Togolese Minister of Public Service Efficiency and Digital Transformation, Cina Lawson, officially launched the National Local Language Challenge on Friday, 2 October 2026, in Lomé. This project aims to mobilize all Togolese citizens to design and develop a IA capable of interacting, listening, and writing in the approximately fifty languages spoken throughout the national territory.
Supported by Togo AI Lab, this initiative is part of the national program 'Voix du Togo', scheduled over a duration of 3 years. The primary objective is to permanently remove linguistic barriers and allow the entire population, including those who are not fluent in French or who cannot read or write, to easily access administrative procedures, healthcare, and justice services.
In the country, the vast majority of the population communicates daily in local languages that remain very poorly represented in digital tools. While the digitization of administrative procedures continues at a steady pace, this absence represented a major obstacle for many users.
Thanks to the new technological models that will be developed as part of the project, a patient will be able to clearly explain their symptoms to a doctor, a litigant will be able to obtain an accurate translation of their statement, and every resident will be able to complete an administrative procedure simply by using their voice.
The chosen approach relies entirely on the direct participation of residents. Since Friday, 5 October 2026, anyone with a mobile phone number can connect to the dedicated online platform.
On this digital space, everyone can record their voice by reading sentences, transcribe voice recordings, translate texts, or verify the quality of other users' contributions.
To encourage participation, each validated contribution is eligible for remuneration. Furthermore, field agents are deployed in the least connected areas to record the voices of residents directly in their living environments.
According to the Ministry of Public Service Efficiency, the deployment of the program follows a rigorous methodology. The first step consists of collecting recordings and texts before having them validated by language specialists and local communities.
Subsequently, Togolese computer scientists will participate in 4 competitions to train IA models.
For each language, teams must gather at least 50 hours of audio recording, 6 000 translated sentences, and recordings from 500 different people. A pilot phase begins first with Ewe, Kabyè, and Moba, before gradually extending to the other 47 languages of the country over a total period of 7 months.
The focus of this civic mobilization is to preserve Togo's linguistic heritage while laying the foundations for its digital strategy by 2030.
Anselme Akéko
Published on 08/10/26 13:30
The Editorial Staff