2025 Report

We started in March 2025 as a small group addressing a massive gap. the digital language divide. We saw that in the AI era, African languages were being left behind as "low-resource" afterthoughts. We officially kicked off in May 2025 and became a registered, incorporated language infrastructure company by September.

A major technical milestone involved identifying and extending existing datasets from Masakhane to more African languages using AI. We knew AI alone wasn't enough, so we created a system where our community manually cross-checks and corrects AI outputs to ensure cultural accuracy.

By the end of 2025, our registered community of 413 members helped us reach a massive milestone. 51,822 validated sentences. This work was achieved across 8 active African languages:

• Swahili. Our top validator, Theogene Imfurayase, helped foster the completion of Swahili validation. Priscilla Amuok led the team to validate over 25,000 sentences.
• Yoruba. Led by Joy Naomi Olusanya, the team validated approximately 1,500 sentences.
• Igbo. Led by Courage Nwaigbo, the team validated over 5,000 samples.
• Hausa. Faisal Adam led the team in validating more than 5,000 sentences.
• Luo. Judith Auma led the team to validate over 5,000 sentences.
• Kinyarwanda. Led by Shema Maxime, the team validated over 2,000 sentences.
• Kikuyu. John Gachie led the team to validate approximately 2,000 sentences.
• Nigerian Pidgin. Odunayo Buliaminu served as a major player and leader for the Nigerian Pidgin validation tasks.

We believe that for AI to be truly global, it has to serve speakers of African languages with the same precision as dominant global ones. Our building blocks. datasets, speech recognition systems, and NLP utilities. are the essential infrastructure for a future where culture is preserved, not erased.

As we transition into 2026, our goals include hosting public webinars on language infrastructure, migrating to our in-house validation tool, and identifying novel benchmarking datasets to keep pushing the frontier.

If you want to read our full Tonative 2025 End of Year Report or collaborate on our 2026 roadmap, email us at community@tonative.org.