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Breaking Barriers and Mounting Cutting-edge research: The NaijaVoices Project

In 2012/2022. Prof G.M.T Emezue and her co-Principal Investigator and co-grantee, Chris Emezue, won the LACUNA fund for their project entitled “NaijaVoices: Curating Speech datasets in the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba languages.” The LACUNA fund is a grant for promoting researchers in low-resourced languages of the world, and it is funded by organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Google.org and other major funders.

With a major partner as Lanfrica, the duo embarked on the research project with partnerships from the Global KANAC Ltd and Digital Learning Indaba (DLI). And within the space of 4 months, the research team was able to work with not less than 5, 000 people from the three languages communities in producing 1,800 hours of speech datasets in these three major Nigerian Languages. These datasets remain today the largest volume of audio datasets in these three Nigerian Languages.

Click here to visit the NaijaVoices website to learn more about the project