Call for Chapters: Masakhane Playbook
The Masakhane community is opening a Call for Chapters for the Masakhane Playbook — a community-driven, open guide for building, evaluating, and deploying NLP systems for African languages. We invite researchers, practitioners, students, language experts, and community members to contribute chapters that shape how the next generation of African language technology is built.
Why a Playbook?
African languages remain underrepresented in mainstream NLP. The Playbook exists to close that gap by collecting practical, reproducible, and culturally grounded guidance: from data collection and annotation, through model training and evaluation, to deployment and ethics. Rather than a static textbook, it is a living resource maintained by the community it serves.
What we're looking for
We welcome chapter proposals on (but not limited to):
- Data — curation, licensing, dialectal coverage, low-resource bootstrapping, parallel corpora, speech datasets.
- Annotation — guidelines for African languages, inter-annotator agreement, tooling, working with native-speaker annotators.
- Modeling — machine translation, ASR/TTS, NER, POS, sentiment, multilingual pretraining, adapters, and small/efficient models.
- Evaluation — human evaluation protocols, benchmarks, error analysis specific to African language families.
- Deployment — productionizing models on the continent, edge devices, offline-first applications, language ID, code-switching.
- Ethics & Community — consent, data sovereignty, fair compensation for contributors, language preservation.
- Case Studies — end-to-end stories from real projects (Hausa, Amharic, Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo, Zulu, Wolof, and many more).
Who can contribute?
Anyone. You do not need to be an academic. We particularly encourage:
- First-time authors paired with mentors from the community
- Native speakers and linguists working alongside ML practitioners
- Students, independent researchers, and industry contributors
- Cross-organizational collaborations (Masakhane, EthioNLP, HausaNLP, Lanfrica, Zindi, and others)
How to propose a chapter
- Submit a proposal — a short abstract (200–400 words), an outline, target audience, and the languages/topics covered.
- Review — proposals are reviewed by the editorial team for fit, scope, and overlap with existing chapters.
- Draft — accepted authors work in the open on the Playbook GitHub repository, with reviewer support.
- Publish — accepted chapters are merged into the Playbook with author attribution and DOIs (where applicable).
Key dates
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Call opens | 30 April 2026 |
| Proposal deadline | 30 June 2026 |
| Acceptance notifications | 31 July 2026 |
| First drafts due | 30 September 2026 |
| Reviewer feedback | 31 October 2026 |
| Final chapters due | 15 December 2026 |
How to get involved
- Read the existing Playbook: /playbook
- Open a proposal issue on the GitHub repository
- Join the Masakhane community: masakhane.io
- Questions? Reach out via the GitHub Discussions tab on the repo.
We are building a resource by the community, for the community. If you have a perspective, an experiment, or a story that deserves to be in the Playbook — we want to hear from you.
Ǹbá! Karibu! Welkom! Bienvenue! Bem-vindos!