Partner Registry

Funding

The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) funds MbazaNLP's community infrastructure work through the Digital Transformation Center Rwanda (contract G-011174-077). GIZ's support covers website development, community engineering standards, model documentation, and community events through the DPG (Digital Public Good) maintainer programme.

Data

Digital Umuganda is a community-driven initiative that collects and open-sources Kinyarwanda language data through collaborative crowdsourcing. MbazaNLP's translation and speech models draw on data collected through Digital Umuganda campaigns, and the two communities share contributors and coordinate data collection sprints.

FairForward is a GIZ initiative working to make AI more open, fair, and accessible in the Global South. FairForward supports MbazaNLP's work on responsible AI practices for low-resource African languages, including model documentation standards, bias disclosure, and the open licensing of all community outputs under Apache 2.0 and CC-BY.

Masakhane is a pan-African NLP research community focused on African languages. MbazaNLP collaborates with Masakhane on research methodology, evaluation benchmarks, and grant applications. Community members participate in Masakhane research calls and contribute to shared datasets and models for East African languages.

Research

CMU Africa's graduate programme in Engineering AI in Kigali provides a pipeline of NLP researchers and engineers engaged with MbazaNLP's work. Community members have drawn on CMU Africa's computing resources and research expertise for model development and evaluation on Kinyarwanda benchmarks.

Research

The University of Rwanda is the country's largest public university, with faculties spanning science, engineering, and social sciences. UR collaborates with MbazaNLP on Kinyarwanda NLP research, providing academic expertise and student contributors to dataset creation and model evaluation work.

Community

SheCanCode is Rwanda's leading coding bootcamp for women, training hundreds of female software developers across cohorts in Kigali. MbazaNLP partners with SheCanCode to engage women technologists in African language AI, broadening participation in NLP research and open-source contributions.

Community

kLab is Rwanda's premier technology innovation hub, supporting startups and tech communities in Kigali. Through kLab's co-working space and events programme, MbazaNLP hosts community sprints, hackathons, and workshops on Kinyarwanda NLP tools and applications.

Community

RISA is the Rwandan government agency responsible for ICT and digital transformation. RISA supports MbazaNLP's work on Kinyarwanda language technology as part of Rwanda's broader digital economy and e-government agenda, and facilitates links between the community and government data partners.