DuniaCom Group has been selected as an awardee of the Mozilla Common Voice Kiswahili Grant. The Grant for this project has been endowed by Mozilla Common Voice as part of its open-source initiative to make voice technology more inclusive by working with companies and universities to develop locally suitable, and voice-enabled technological solutions that leverage Mozilla’s open source Kiswahili data set to unlock social and economic opportunities for the underserved communities in East Africa. The initiative is being supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH (German Development Cooperation).

A majority of smallholder farmers in Tanzania are only able to communicate through the Kiswahili spoken language and its dialects. DuniaCom Group’s implementation will center around the development of a Kiswahili Text and Voice Recognition Platform (KTVRP) for Agricultural Advisory and Financial Services for Smallholder Farmers. A text and voice-based platform made available in the language of the underserved (i.e., Kiswahili) would be key to wide access, adoption, and usage of digital agricultural advisory and financial services in Tanzania. The objective is to develop a text and voice recognition platform that will offer smallholder farmers in the Tanzanian Maize Value Chain personalized digital financial and non-financial automated services based on location, agro-ecological zones, and crop cycle. Based on gender-disaggregated data from the pilot phase, it is anticipated that the majority of participants will be women.