Open-Source AI for Africa · Nairobi
Makini AI builds open evaluation tools and language resources so AI works safely and fairly for African communities, in their own languages. Everything we build is open-source and free.
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, transforming agriculture, healthcare, education, financial services, and government. Adoption is already racing ahead of the infrastructure meant to support it. In Kenya, 42% of internet users were using ChatGPT by mid-2025, among the highest rates in Africa, and across the continent AI uptake is surging fastest precisely where people are underserved by Western platforms. But this AI was built, trained, and safety-tested in English and a handful of global languages. The communities adopting it most eagerly are using systems that have never been evaluated in the languages they actually 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.
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.
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.
View on Hugging FaceDetecting 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.
Hate-speech detection for Swahili and French, documenting where models trained on European data fail on African content.
An AI assistant for employment and labour law across 30 African countries. Workers, HR teams, and legal practitioners get accurate, jurisdiction-aware answers on hiring, contracts, termination, and workplace rights, grounded in each country's labour legislation. Currently in beta.
Try on Hugging FaceCivic-legal AI for Kenyan languages, helping citizens access governance and legal information in their mother tongue.
Get in touch
We partner with researchers, governments, and organizations building AI that serves African communities.