Fostering Multilingualism in African Scholarship Through Digital Tools

Since our launch in 2018, we made it a priority to enable African scholars to submit their work to AfricArXiv in indigenous languages, besides English, French, and Arabic. There are several initiatives to foster African languages in schools and also universities such as African languages studies, natural language processing, and translations among others. Here is Chido Dzinotyiwei who is making it easier to learn indigenous African languages through her initiative, Vambo academy. Chido is a Master of Commerce student at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business (UCT GSB). 

Chido Dzinotyiwei, the brain behind Vambo Academy. Image source: https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2021-11-12-new-online-tool-helps-users-learn-an-african-language [original blog]

Africa is the fastest-growing and second-largest continent in the world. Sadly, African knowledge resources are difficult to source. At Vambo Academy we aim to bridge that gap and make learning fun.

Chido Dzinotyiwei

Read more about Vambo academy at https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2021-11-12-new-online-tool-helps-users-learn-an-african-language

Initiatives such as the Vambo academy foster communication in African languages and access information that is available in African languages. This is especially significant to African researchers who share their research in African languages, and the audience who are interacting with research written in African languages. AfricArXiv is also contributing to the democratization of access to scholarly publication in African languages by accepting research articles and lay summaries authored in African languages. Additionally, AfricArXiv together with Masakhane is building a multilingual parallel corpus of African research from translations of research manuscripts submitted to AfricArXiv. These efforts support the  African Principles for Open Access in Scholarly Communication regarding language diversity which states that African research output should be made available in the principle common language of the global science community as well as in one or more local African languages.