How can we open up the internet to the English-illiterate in Africa?
CIGF’s plan to increase internet access in Uganda by breaking the language barrier blocking the 79% internet users who can not read and comprehend English.
What’s wrong?
Moore’s law is connecting more users to the internet, as devices get more affordable and thankfully, more people get to reap the benefits of communication, entertainment, the come with.
However, virtually the whole internet is still written in English or equally exotic languages, of which these new users are illiterate, which creates an osmotic flow of information into the internet, but not otherwise, with most of the knowledge incomprehensible to the new users.
But the title said…
Yes, we are fixing this. We have developed an NLP model to translate English to Luganda, trained on 30k+ features, which is capable of translating complex English phrases to Luganda, the primary Language used in Uganda, and released a mobile app, Wangi, on the Google Play Store and website.
We hope to increase accessibility of the internet and the vast sea of information it holds, since the user can translate information acquired at their convenience.