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Strive Masiyiwa's Cassava Technologies has signed a five-year commitment alongside Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia to make artificial intelligence usable in languages the technology currently ignores.
Sixty organisations announced the pact in New York on Sept. 21, coordinated by the Gates Foundation. Their target is 3.4 billion people who speak languages underrepresented in today's AI models and cannot use AI tools in their own language or voice.
The scale of the gap is the reason. Only a small share of the world's roughly 7,000 languages carries enough digitised text and speech to train a capable AI model, which leaves everyone else with systems that misunderstand them or fail entirely. Africa alone has more than 2,000 languages, over 30% of the global total.
The signatories will work across four areas: building open language data infrastructure, setting benchmarks to measure progress, converting that data into working models and applications, and protecting privacy and consent as they go.
Voice matters as much as text. In communities where typing is impractical, an AI that cannot hear dialects, slang and idiom is of little use.
The list of participants runs well beyond the large technology companies. It includes the African research collective Masakhane, the South African startup Lelapa AI, Data Science Nigeria, Deep Learning Indaba, Digital Umuganda in Rwanda, India's AI4Bharat and Sarvam, the Ethiopia AI Institute, Senegal's telecommunications ministry, Britain's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Unicef and the World Bank.
Cassava brings the infrastructure. Masiyiwa's group opened an AI factory in South Africa that rents Nvidia processing power to African developers and businesses, having agreed in March 2025 to install 3,000 graphics processing units there before adding 9,000 more across Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco and Egypt. It launched a platform called the Cassava AI Multi-Model Exchange last November, giving African customers access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
The company agreed separately this month with Vodafone Business to build what the two describe as Egypt's first AI factory.
Masiyiwa is Zimbabwe's wealthiest person. He spent five years in court breaking the state monopoly on telecommunications before launching Econet Wireless Zimbabwe in 1998, and has built Cassava into a pan-African digital infrastructure group spanning data centres, connectivity and cloud services.
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