UNICEF WCARO NLP Landscape

West and Central Africa Language Technology
Last updated: 2026-04-23
Work in progress. Some data may contain inaccuracies. Contribute on GitHub

CONCREE

Startup emerging

Organization Information

Startup
2020
small
emerging
partial
Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal
Impact partners (30+). Revenue from entrepreneurship platform and programs. Partnerships with USAID, UNIDO, ITC, ENABEL, French Embassy in Senegal.
CONCREE

Coverage

Senegal

Description

Senegalese social enterprise originally focused on entrepreneurship support (virtual incubation, business training). Has expanded into AI/NLP for Wolof through the "Adia" product suite. 1,000+ entrepreneurs supported, 57+ programs delivered, 7,000+ platform users. The Adia suite includes: Adia_TTS (Wolof text-to-speech, Apache 2.0, trained on 40 hours of Wolof speech data), Wolof LLM variants (Llama 3.2 fine-tuned), and Tambali (AI co-pilot that transforms business ideas into action plans). Technical work led by Moustapha Sarr and Hawoly Deme, who have produced 11+ models and 11+ datasets under personal accounts focused on Wolof TTS and text generation. Also connected to "Startup SamaIA" ("My AI" in Wolof).

🦄 UNICEF Relevance

Senegalese company with established institutional partnerships (USAID, UNIDO, ITC). Adia_TTS is one of very few open Wolof TTS models (Apache 2.0). Their entrepreneurship platform and Tambali AI co-pilot demonstrate practical deployment of Wolof language technology. Adds to Senegal actor coverage alongside GalsenAI and Baamtu. Relevant for March 2026 Senegal summit.

Key People

Projects

Partnerships

Notes

Primary business is entrepreneurship support, not NLP. AI work is a recent expansion. Many HuggingFace Spaces are currently in error state, suggesting active development. Moustapha Sarr and Hawoly Deme are also affiliated with "Startup SamaIA" -- possibly a sister initiative. "Sama" means "my" in Wolof.

Last updated: 2026-01-26