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Coming soon

AfriFinder

Find annotators and collaborators for any African language — vetted by the communities who speak it.

The problem

African NLP runs into the same two walls again and again: finding verified, quality annotators for a specific language, and finding the right researcher, linguist, or engineer to collaborate with. Today this happens over Twitter, WhatsApp groups, and word of mouth — slow, opaque, and hard to scale. AfriFinder is a single place to do both, with people who actually speak the language vouching for who is qualified.

Two modules

Annotation Marketplace

A workspace for posting and picking up annotation jobs in African languages — transcription, translation, sentiment, NER, and more.

  • Researchers, companies, and NGOs post tasks with clear scope, pay, and timeline.
  • Annotators register, declare their native and fluent languages, and get verified by a Language Lead.
  • Language Leads are trusted community figures per language — Yoruba, Twi, Amharic, and so on — who vet annotators and resolve disputes.
  • Quality is tracked through agreement scores, reviewer tiers, and lead sign-off.

Expert & Collaborator Directory

Profiles of researchers, engineers, and linguists working on African languages — searchable by what they actually do.

  • Tagged by language expertise (Hausa, Zulu, Wolof, and others).
  • Tagged by NLP domain — MT, ASR, sentiment, TTS, NER, and so on.
  • Tagged by role: academic, industry, independent, linguist.
  • Filterable by region. Open to collaboration requests and project invitations.

How it differs from MTurk

MTurkAfriFinder
Generic, globalAfrican languages first
No language verificationLanguage Lead gatekeeping
No expert networkMarketplace plus directory in one place
No community layerCommunity-owned per language
Pays in USD, often hard to accessMobile money and local payout options

Get involved

AfriFinder is in early development. If you want to be a Language Lead, join the directory as an expert, or post the first annotation jobs once we go live, tell us which language and role you're interested in.

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