SunbirdAI

"These skills have helped me personally and changed things for two people in my home. If you can continue with these teachings, please do, and don't stop."

She sells maize and rice at a market in northern Uganda. For a long time she thought her young child was simply being disrespectful. Then she heard Every Child Can Learn, @Backup_Uganda podcast for parents and caregivers about learning difficulties and disabilities that helped her learn how to support her child's education.

Now she encourages other parents in her community to listen. "Some people listen but others don't, but I will continue trying and I won't stop."

The podcast is produced in Acholi so parents can listen in the language they speak. Back-Up Uganda shares the episode audio in English or Luganda. Our language technology transcribes it and drafts the Acholi translation, and their team then produces an acholi version of the episode. In our assessment with them, based on their team's feedback, the time to finish an episode fell from 2–3 working days to 1–1.5.

Through market outreach, our partners at Backup Uganda have reached over 1,000 parents and vendors across four markets.

Try Sunflower for translation, summaries and chat in 67 African languages: lnkd.in/dGZ9XSQ5

Speech-to-text and text-to-speech: speech.sunbird.ai

Learn more or get in touch: sunbird.ai

#InclusiveEducation #AfricanLanguageTechnology #AIforGood

We recently joined the Kampala Capital City Authority Kampala Capital City Authority @KCCAUG Environmental Management team in the field to validate the sensors in our noise monitoring pilot against reference sound level meters.

Noise is more than a nuisance. The World Health Organisation links long-term exposure to environmental noise with disturbed sleep, high blood pressure, heart disease and poorer learning in children. Most of that evidence comes from cities outside Africa. In Kampala, there is still little continuous local data on how loud the city gets, where and when.

The pilot is working to fill that gap. Sensors that record around the clock give city authorities a consistent record to plan with, set priorities and track whether interventions are working. It is data for evidence-based governance, generated here, about our own city.

The pilot builds on years of noise work in Kampala and Entebbe. That work produced Urban Noise Uganda 61K, a publicly available dataset of recorded city sounds.

Explore the noise dashboard: noise.sunbird.ai
Read the paper in Scientific Data: doi.org/10.1038/s41597…
Explore the dataset: huggingface.co/datasets/Sunbi…

#NoisePollution #EnvironmentalHealth #EvidenceBasedGovernance #Kampala #SunbirdAI #AIForSocialGood

@AfrilangAi 2026: Bridging Low-Resource Gaps in African Languages is open.

Most languages spoken across Africa still have little or no support in today’s AI tools. The second AI for African Languages Conference, hosted by Sunbird AI, brings together the people working to change that.

On 10 December in Kampala, researchers, engineers, industry teams and policymakers will come together to share learnings on African language technology from across the continent.

Registration is still open.

If you haven’t signed up yet: afrilangai.github.io

#AfriLangAI #AIForAfricanLanguages #SunbirdAI

Last week, our team spent the day in Naguru Go-Down, Kampala, putting Sunflower in people’s hands.

Residents tried it the way they would in daily life: asking questions in their own languages, translating messages, speaking to it and listening to it reply.

What we learned goes straight back to our research team and will shape the next round of improvements. Thank you to everyone in Naguru Go-Down who gave us their time and feedback .

Try Sunflower:
Chat and translate in African languages: sunflower.sunbird.ai

Speak, transcribe and listen: speech.sunbird.ai

Organisations, businesses, public services and developers can also bring local-language translation, speech recognition and voice into their own tools through the Sunbird API.

Sign up for free at api.sunbird.ai

#AIForSocialGood #ForAfricasManyVoices #SunbirdAI

Tomorrow, the @DataCitiesUg Urban Data Dialogue Series returns with Episode 7:

Urban Data Governance in Africa: Local Evidence, Global Lessons.Urban Data Governance in Africa: Local Evidence, Global Lessons

Collecting data is one step. Using it to plan, budget and deliver services is another. This session brings together people working on that problem from city government, GIS and local revenue systems.

Meet the panel:
Prof. Engineer Bainomugisha @iBaino (Host), Principal, College of Computing and Information Sciences, Makerere University

Xaver Schker , Senior Implementation and Advisory Lead, Urban Finance Program, @AfricaUrbanLab

Pauline Okeyo, Senior Solution Engineer, @Esri , Middle East, Africa and Central Asia

Flavia Zabali, GIS Supervisor, Kampala Capital City Authority @KCCAUG

📅 Thursday, 29 October 2026
🕔 5:00 to 6:00 PM EAT

Register: undp.zoom.us/webinar/regist…

@SunbirdAI @UNGlobalPulse @ToroDev
#DataCities #UrbanData #DataGovernance