Mandla

Africa is the most linguistically diverse continent on Earth, with over 2000 languages and billions of native speakers. Despite recent advances in online language learning, there remains no major education platform that supports more than one or two African languages. We, the Mandla Team, have decided to tackle this issue head on. Mandla is an e-learning platform that aims to: 1. Teach African languages. 2. Build an African language database to improve translation models. 3. Preserve Cultures. Our entire team is composed of first generation African immigrants from Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya. Growing up, we each faced the problem of wanting to improve our fluency in our parents’ native languages and not being able to find any quality resources to do so. And it wasn't just us; Many of our peers were facing this same problem as well. In our quest to improve our fluency, we discovered countless Instagram pages, YouTube channels, and reddit forums dedicated to learning different African languages, but still no quality gamified online platform. Mandla solves this problem. We launched the beta versions of our iOS, Android, and web apps in December 2021 with support for over 15 of Africa’s most spoken languages and have quickly amassed over 50,000 users.