INVESTMENT
INNOVATION
AFDB PROVIDES $1M GRANT for AI-
based national customer management systems in Ghana, Rwanda & Zambia
T
he African Development Bank (AfDB) announced in March that its Board of Directors had approved a $1.024-million grant for AI-enabled systems to process customer complaints on behalf of the national banks of Ghana, Rwanda, as well as for the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission of Zambia.
The grant was made from the Africa Digital Financial Inclusion Facility (ADFI), a special fund dedicated to accelerating digital financial inclusion across the continent. The AfDB said the project will establish a complaints-handling system for the financial regulators, using multilingual chatbots and artificial intelligence that will interface with key financial services providers in the three countries. The system will incorporate key local languages for ease-of-use, record customer complaints, including audio complaints from those unable to read and write, and track their resolution. The project is expected to improve the tracking of customer complaints made to financial services providers, strengthen the support for marginalised groups -- which will build confidence in the use of financial services -- and improve the collection
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of consistent data to be used for the development or improvement of consumerprotection policies. ADFI co-ordinator Sheila Okiro pointed out that facilitation of sound policies and regulations, including those that enhance consumer protection and catalyse financial inclusion, is a key man-date for ADFI. “With the proliferation of digital financial services, the financial industry needs innovative mechanisms for customer recourse and tracking for regulators. The Sinitic project is one such solution,” added Okiro. The system will be developed by Sinitic Africa in collaboration with BFA, a consultancy firm specialising in humancentred design and DFS regulation. Sinitic Africa is a subsidiary of Sinitic Inc., a financial technology firm based in Canada. The two companies have already worked together to develop and successfully deploy a similar project for the Philippines’ central bank. The Sinitic solution will be deployed in the three target countries in the following languages: Kinyarwanda, Swahili, French and English in Rwanda; English and Nyanja/ Chewa in Zambia; and English and Twi in Ghana.
Grassroots NLP community Masakhane wins Wikimedia Foundation Research of the Year award Masakhane, a grassroots organisation which aims to strengthen and encourage Natural Language Processing (NLP) research in African languages for Africans by Africans was in April awarded the Wikimedia Research Award of the Year for its paper Participatory Research for Lowresourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages. Masakhane received the award together with Kay Zhu, Dylan Walker and Lev Muchnik for their paper Content Growth and Attention Contagion in Information Networks: Addressing Information Poverty on Wikipedia. The award was presented virtually to Masakhane by Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Walles. Machine Translation (MT) is crucial for information accessibility and communication worldwide. Despite this, MT is still centred around a few highresources languages, widely excluding African languages.
