Open-source AI for Africa · Nairobi
Nobody checked whether the AI Africans already use works in their languages. Makini AI builds the open evaluation tools and language resources that do the checking, so AI works safely and fairly for African communities. Everything we build is free and open-source.
Rada is built with Google.org, Microsoft AI for Good and the Gates Foundation.
Featured
In developmentRada is a civic tech platform that helps citizens reach governance and legal information in their mother tongue.
We were accepted into the Masakhane Afri Lingua Program, in partnership with Microsoft AI for Good.
Project partners
Projects
An AI legal assistant grounded in the complete Laws of Kenya. Kenya's official legal platform is often down, and general AI models hallucinate Kenyan law and procedure, failing the citizens and paralegals least able to catch the errors. Iroh gives accurate, source-cited answers.
1,000+ users in week one
An open corpus of the complete Laws of Kenya: 546 Acts and thousands of court judgments, structured into 63,000+ searchable chunks. The substrate for Iroh and for legal-AI research.
Detecting social and gender bias in Swahili and African French. Built on AfricaBias-SW-FR, the first large-scale African-language bias dataset (35,285 annotated sentences), developed through the AfriLabs AI Accelerator with support from the Gates Foundation.
0.979 F1 macro · +44.7 over nearest baseline · +52.3 over Afro-XLMR
Hate-speech detection for Swahili and French, documenting where models trained on European data fail on African content.
0.92 Swahili F1, outperforms GPT-4o (0.75)
Partners & backers
Project partners
Programs
Recognition
Our commitment
Every dataset, model, and tool we build is released free and open-source. Our work is a public good: accessible to researchers, developers, governments, and communities across Africa, with no proprietary lock-in.
The stakes are continental. AI could add up to $2.9 trillion to Africa's economy by 2030, and in Kenya 42% of internet users were using ChatGPT by mid-2025. But this AI was built and safety-tested in English and a handful of global languages. The communities adopting it most eagerly are using systems never evaluated in the languages they speak. That gap is the difference between AI that empowers and AI that quietly misinforms, on legal rights, on health, on public services. We build the open tools to close it.
Get in touch
We partner with funders, governments, researchers, and organizations building AI that serves African communities.
Nairobi, Kenya