Join Us on June 24 for the AI+Africa Working Group Meeting – Early findings from our landscape study

On May 15, 2025, the AI in Africa MERL Working Group at the Natural Language Processing Community of Practice (NLP-CoP) hosted a powerful virtual meeting to reignite momentum and collaboration within the working group. Since then, we’ve been conducting a landscape study through continued conversations with members to better understand the needs, gaps, and priorities shaping the future of AI and MERL in Africa.

During our last meeting, we explored key questions with participants, including:

• What knowledge or skills are missing—and which are emerging—in Africa’s MERL+AI space?
• What should a truly Made in Africa approach to AI and Evaluation look and feel like in practice?
• What will it take to build strong, sustainable collaboration for Made in Africa AI & Evaluation?

We invite you to join us again on June 24 for a special meeting. During this session, Working Group Lead Vari Matimba will present early findings and insights from our ongoing landscape study. Together, we’ll engage in a participatory discussion to reflect on and validate the results from interviews, focus groups, and community inputs.

Register here to join us on June 24, at 11 am ET/4 pm BST/ 5pm CAT, CET/ 6pm EAT: this meeting is open to members of the working group!

Find out more about joining the NLP Community of Practice convened by the MERL Tech Initiative! In addition to gaining access to resources and events at the intersection of MERL and NLP, you can join a wide range of working groups covering everything from NLP in Ethics and Governance to Social and Behaviour Change Communications.