LINGUA Africa Open Call for Inclusive AI Language Projects - Data Creation (Discontinued)

LINGUA Africa Open Call for Inclusive AI Language Projects is sponsored by Microsoft Research (in collaboration with Gates Foundation, Google.org, and Masakhane). This call supports African-led AI solutions that address a range of development challenges, including health, agriculture, and education, by increasing the availability and quality of African-language resources. Projects emphasize creating open speech, text, multimodal, and sign-language datasets; developing automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies; and building practical AI tools for underserved communities.

LINGUA Open Call is a grant from Microsoft AI for Good Lab that funds projects building inclusive AI language resources for underrepresented African languages. Launched in partnership with the Gates Foundation, Google.org, and the Masakhane African Languages Hub, LINGUA Africa supports data creation (up to $50K cash plus $50K compute credits), model and tool development (up to $100K cash plus $100K compute credits), and real-world sectoral applications (up to $250K cash plus $400K compute credits). Eligible applicants include nonprofits, universities, research institutes, startups, and cultural organizations globally, provided projects meaningfully partner with Africa-based institutions. The application deadline is June 15, 2026.

Lacuna Fund is a first-of-its-kind multi-funder collaboration formed in 2020 (and transferred to Global South leadership in July 2025) to fill gaps in data used to train Machine Learning models, making ML and AI more representative, accurate, equitable, and accessible to underserved communities worldwide. The Fund supports grantees to create high-quality, openly accessible machine-learning datasets that serve urgent problems in Africa, Asia, and Latin America across four thematic areas: agriculture (crop monitoring, smallholder farming, soil and weather datasets); language (low-resource language NLP datasets, including text, speech, and machine translation across 29+ African languages and indigenous Latin American languages); health (clinical AI datasets, disease surveillance, epidemiology); and climate (climate adaptation, weather prediction, ecosystem monitoring). Following the July 2025 leadership transition, the Fund is now governed by ACTS (African Centre for Technology Studies), CENIA (Chile's National Centre for AI), Masakhane, and the University of Pretoria's Data Science for Social Impact Research Group — putting Global South institutions firmly in control of priorities, calls, and grantmaking decisions. Calls are issued in cohorts by thematic area; the 2026 cohort emphasizes climate datasets and continued investment in African language NLP.

The Microsoft AI for Good Lab Open Call is a grant program awarding $5 million in funding and Azure service credits to organizations leveraging artificial intelligence to address social and scientific challenges. The two-year program provides opportunities for scientific collaboration with Microsoft AI for Good Lab researchers along with Azure cloud computing resources. Focus areas include sustainability public health education and human rights. Successful applicants demonstrate potential for their concept and data to result in a unique and scalable solution to a major scientific or societal challenge using clean accurate and unbiased high-quality data. The inaugural 2025 cycle funded 20 projects in Washington state including work at Washington State University on AI for agriculture health and education. The program is expected to continue with future open calls. This program is distinct from the Microsoft AI for Accessibility grants which focus specifically on disability and accessibility solutions and from the Microsoft Accelerating Foundation Models Research Program which provides compute credits for foundation model research.

Lacuna Fund is a multi-funder, multi-stakeholder collaboration formed in 2020 to fill gaps in data used to train Machine Learning (ML) models, making ML and AI more representative, accurate, equitable, and accessible to underserved communities globally. The fund issues thematic calls for dataset creation across four priority domains: (1) Agriculture - datasets supporting AI for smallholder farming, crop monitoring, livestock health, pest detection, and food security in low-resource regions; (2) Climate - datasets enabling AI for climate adaptation, biodiversity monitoring, environmental change detection, and disaster response; (3) Health - datasets for AI in disease surveillance, diagnostic tools, maternal/child health, and health systems in low and middle income countries; and (4) Natural Language Processing - datasets advancing AI in low-resource and African languages. To date, Lacuna Fund has enabled creation of over 75 new ML datasets including 18 newly published datasets in 2025. Funders include Google.org, Rockefeller Foundation, International Development Research Centre (IDRC), GIZ on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and additional supporters. Calls are issued on rolling thematic schedule with secretariat-managed application cycles.