Language Sciences / Global Challenges Initiative Research Forum with Africa’s Voices

Africa's Voices combines media and technology in delivering methods to listen intelligently and amplify diverse, local voices. At this meeting, Africa's Voices will present research opportunities of relevance to Computing and/or Language Sciences, amongst other disciplines.

Africa’s Voices, spun out of research at Cambridge University in 2015, combines citizen engagement with social research in powerful new ways. Africa's Voices opens up communication channels and spark engaging discussions with hard-to-reach communities using contextually relevant technologies such as interactive radio, SMS, instant messaging (IM) and social media. Such ‘live’ citizen engagement is of immediate value, but it is also a rich data source for understanding and tracking the voices of target populations. Africa's Voices analyses citizen-generated data using social science research designs and methodologies, combined with specialised techniques for analysing large volumes of complex local language text.

In three years, Africa's Voices has amplified the voices of over 200,000 citizens in evidence-based programming at: UNICEF (Somalia), Oxfam (Kenya), Trocaire (Kenya), Well Told Story (Kenya), Livity Africa (South Africa) and others on priorities ranging from health and immunisation, child protection and gender, water, hygiene and sanitation, to cash transfers, local governance and municipal elections, tax justice, and extractive industries. 

Over the last few years, Africa's Voices has collaborated with early career researchers, students and faculty in the Computer Lab and DTAL, amongst other departments, in helping to develop and test new practical methods to support our work. Some examples include:

• CODA, an interface to assist manual and automated coding processes
• A Web-app and compling tools for sentiment analysis in Sheng (slang language)

Africa's Voices will present research opportunities of relevance to Computing and/or Language Sciences, amongst other disciplines, as part of its commitment to move to a more sustainable model of engaging with Cambridge researchers.   

  

The meeting will be run jointly with the Language Sciences Interdisciplinary Research Centre. 

Please email Sara Serradas Duarte (sbas2@cam.ac.uk) if would like to attend.