AI Action Summit Side Event: 'Every Language Matters'

How local innovators are making AI more accessible and what the global community can do to support

January 22, 2025
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Join us in Paris for the AI Action Summit side event called 'Every Language Matters: How local innovators are making AI more accessible and what the global community can do to support.'


Join the discussion on 11 February as we highlight diverse perspectives from the public sector, private sector and civil society/academia from both the Global South and Global North.

The event will showcase use cases and emerging impact from AI innovators and feature initiatives that are leading the charge to digitize low-resource languages globally.
 

a group of people that are talking to each other
Photo: PNUD RDC

The challenge and opportunity

An estimated 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide, each a signifier of heritage and identity. Today, linguists estimate that most of the world’s unique languages are facing severe endangerment or extinction by the end of this century. This dire reality threatens a loss of entire knowledge systems and jeopardizes the preservation of much of humanity’s rich cultural heritage.

This reality is also reflected in the digital realm, with the majority of online activities taking place in high-resource languages, such as English. Low-resource languages—such as Lingala and Kituba (spoken by 40 million and 13.8 million people respectively, mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of the Congo) and Twi (spoken by 18 million people, mostly in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire) - appear on less than 0.1 percent of websites.

Large language models (LLMs) and other natural language processing (NLP) models rely heavily on data scraped from the Internet. As a result, AI models are either not available or underperform for the 1.2 billion native speakers of low-resource languages. Even when AI systems can process queries in low-resource languages, their outputs tend to be slower, less culturally relevant, and insufficiently covered by model safeguards

Voice capabilities are also limited—presenting a significant accessibility barrier, particularly for communities with strong oral traditions or low literacy.  

The consequences of this disparity are far-reaching—and disproportionately impact communities in the Global South. Many communities lack fluency in the second or third languages needed to access essential online services, such as e-learning or telemedicine. 

Closing the language divide in AI is critical to catalyse locally relevant innovation, empower marginalized communities, and ensure no one is left behind no matter the language they speak.
 

What to expect

The event 'Every Language Matters' will showcase innovators and initiatives that are leading the charge  to digitize low-resource languages globally, including from African civil society and academia, as well as from UNDP’s Local Language Accelerator Programme in Serbia, Ghana and the Republic of the Congo. 

The showcase will feature presentations on use cases and emerging impact from AI innovators, followed by a fishbowl-style discussion on actions needed to scale initiatives on Language AI and support currently under-resourced AI ecosystems in digitizing languages. The discussion will  highlight diverse perspectives from the public sector, private sector and civil society/academia from both the Global South and Global North.

UNDP has been supporting pilots and country engagements centred around four critical questions, that we will bring to the AI Action Summit to discuss:

  • Innovative local approaches: use-cases for digitization of languages
  • Community ownership models: fair exchange
  • Responsible and scalable partnership structures
  • Optimal methods for translating inclusive language technologies into public and economic value
     

Speakers

Léon Juste Ibombo, Minister, Ministry of Post Service, Telecommunication, and Digital Economy, Republic of the Congo

Tamara Butigan, Deputy Director National Library of Serbia, Director of Digital Library

Andjelka Zecevic, Researcher Mathematical Institute Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Technical Lead LibrAIfy

Jonas Kgomo, Founder of the Equiano Institute


The event is organized by the United Nations Development Programme
 

How to participate

We cordially invite interested stakeholders from all sectors to participate in the side event. Committed to diversity and inclusivity, we encourage active engagement, particularly from stakeholders from the Global South.

Grab your seat here: ai-inthecity.ens.psl.eu/en/programme
 



UNDP will also be holding another side event on 11 February called 'Towards the Hamburg Declaration on Responsible AI for the SDGs.'