Flagship Projects

The AI4GH initiative supports robust, innovative and interdisciplinary research projects and processes across sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East and North Africa. Each activity within AI4GH promotes ‘responsible AI’ (solutions that are ethical, inclusive, rights-respecting and sustainable) that aims to strengthen gender equality and inclusion, and integrate plans for sustainability, scale and influence. This initiative aims to build regional and global networks across a range of actors, including researchers, policymakers, practitioners, the private sector and civil society.

The Hub for AI and Disability Inclusion (HAIDI) is Africa’s first continent‑wide platform dedicated to embedding disability inclusion across the AI lifecycle. The Hub seeks to strengthen inclusive AI ecosystems by developing disability‑representative data, supporting scalable inclusive AI innovations, and advancing disability‑inclusive AI governance to ensure AI delivers meaningful benefits for people with disabilities across Africa.

The AI4D Responsible AI Collaborators Initiative is a strategic program managed by the Lab for Ethics, Policy and Scaling of AI (LEPSAI) to ensure African AI innovations are ethical, inclusive, and scalable. By providing tailored technical and GEDI (Gender, Equality, and Diversity) mentorship, the initiative bridges the gap between theoretical ethics and practical implementation. It focuses on addressing intersectional marginalization and aligning solutions with UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI to foster a resilient, locally-driven ecosystem that promotes social, economic, and environmental sustainability across sub-Saharan Africa.

This flagship initiative will create high‑quality, open‑source, culturally grounded multimodal datasets—spanning text, speech and vision—across 40 African languages. By anchoring this work in the Masakhane community, a grassroots, expert-led organization that champions participatory methods, the project aims to shift Africa from being a data-poor consumer of AI technologies to a globally recognized contributor to ethical and inclusive AI innovation. Emerging from the AI for Development Funders Collaborative, it represents a cross-donor effort, with parallel funding from IDRC, the UK’s FCDO, the Gates Foundation, and Google.org.

The Africa Compute Initiative (ACI) tackles one of the most binding constraints on African AI innovation: lack of affordable, reliable access to high‑performance compute. ACI will establish Africa’s first high‑performance compute cluster dedicated to development‑focused, university‑based AI research, hosted at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and complemented by flexible cloud access through the Mozilla Foundation. By combining on‑premise GPU infrastructure with action research on access models, governance, and sustainability, ACI enables African researchers and students to train, fine‑tune, and deploy AI models locally, rather than relying on prohibitively expensive off‑continent cloud services.

The Global Index on Responsible AI offers a comprehensive benchmark of countries' commitment to responsible AI, specifically ensuring human rights protections. This project will track emerging trends over time, amplify marginalised voices and provide actionable recommendations to policymakers to align technological advancements with ethical principles and societal wellbeing.

The AI Network of Labs, supported by the AI for Development (AI4D) initiative, connects research and innovation laboratories across Africa to advance responsible, locally relevant artificial intelligence. Operating in multiple countries, the network addresses key development challenges across sectors such as health, agriculture, education, climate, language technologies, and AI governance, while strengthening local capacity and collaboration.

Born out of the AI for Development Funders’ Collaborative, the AI Evidence Alliance for Social Impact is the first phase of a broader collaboration among global funders focused on advancing AI evaluation. It represents a cross-donor effort, co-financed by IDRC, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), Community Jameel, and Google.org.