The 2025 NaijaVoices Language Heritage Micro-Grants

I hold a degree in Biochemistry, with a Master's and Ph.D. in Neuroscience. I currently work as a Project Specialist for the LatamGPT project at CENIA, where I lead the Data and Strategic Partnerships team. Additionally, I am part of OpenAI's global Red Team, where I have contributed to the evaluation of several models, including GPT-4o, Sora, o1, and o3-mini.

I am a PhD student researcher. I do and I am interested in community-driven computational documentation, description, learning and modelling of understudied and undocumented African languages phonetics and phonology. I aim to model African languages through population of linguistic insights in computational systems and machines.

I'm Oreoluwa Babatunde, an AI researcher and cofounder of LyngualLabs. I work on building speech and text datasets for African languages and developing multilingual speech models that support underrepresented communities in natural language processing and voice technology.

Dr. Esther Oduntan is a Chief Lecturer in Computer Science at The Federal Polytechnic, Ilaro. She's interested in machine intelligence (ML, NLP, CV) applied to education, health, and agriculture, and enjoys knowledge sharing through groups like Black in AI and Data Science Network. She actively organizes workshops and participates in tech initiatives.

Dr. Lukman is a postdoctoral researcher at The Johns Hopkins University exploring brain network connectivity in spinal cord injury and gut–brain interactions. He applies AI and computational models to neuroimaging data to improve diagnosis, track therapeutic response, and identify biomarkers. His interests include medical imaging, graph learning, and AI-driven healthcare systems.

Rebecca Knowles is a Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada. Her research focuses on machine translation and computer-aided translation, with recent work in machine translation evaluation, low-resource machine translation, and the Indigenous Languages Technology project at NRC (which focuses on Indigenous languages in Canada).

Bola Agbonile is Founder of Zabbot LLC, a cultural language platform blending AI with heritage preservation. Her mission is to make the learning of heritage languages (starting with Yorùbá) joyful, accessible & culture-infused. As a software engineer & product lead she champions community-led design, & recently volunteered on the NaijaVoices review committee.

I’m a linguist and NLP Research Fellow at The African Research Collective, where I contribute to building and improving tools and resources for Nigerian languages. My work is driven by an interest in linguistically informed models, inclusive AI, and bridging technology with the realities of African language communities.

I am a project manager at South African Centre for Digital Language Resource (SADiLaR), working currently on a digital language preservation initiative, the SWiP project. I have led a national language resource audit across 26 public universities in South Africa and contribute to community development by promoting official languages and facilitating digital skills training in underrepresented communities.

Ramsey is an AI researcher passionate about multimodal and privacy-preserving ML. He is a staff associate at the University of Malawi, where he teaches and also supports the implementation of national digital transformation initiatives using open-source tech in health and agriculture, and serves as Zindi Africa's country ambassador.

I am a Master's student in AI and Language with a focus on multilingual NLP. I have co-developed a humanitarian AI curriculum, supported language data projects for underrepresented communities, and helped more women access digital skills through training and outreach. My work centres on using technology to reflect local realities and support community needs.

Victor is a co-founder at LyngualLabs and an expert in Machine Learning with a focus on multilingual NLP. He is also an active member of Zindi Africa where he has attained a rank of #1 and has contributed several open-source solutions and tutorials in the African AI ecosystem.

I am a Hausa linguist and AI data annotator passionate about inclusive technology. I work on multilingual NLP, ASR training, and ethical AI for underrepresented languages. I also mentor youth on tech careers in Northern Nigeria, supporting digital literacy and community-led innovation through localized language solutions.

I am an assistant professor at Jimma University, specializing in NLP. Passionate about advancing African languages through emerging technologies like AI. I believe that natural language is the backbone of AI and envision a future where African languages are fully supported in the digital world.