16-10-2024

Today, during the Tanzania Annual ICT Conference (TAIC) - Unleashing the Power of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Socio-Economic Transformation, Valeria Sandei (CEO of Almawave) announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Information & Communication Technologies Commission (ICTC) of the United Republic of Tanzania.

The goal is to develop an LLM model “tailored” to the local context that is able to streamline administrative processes through digitalization and improve institutional efficiency as well as interactions with residents.

“This agreement represents an important milestone in our ongoing collaboration with Tanzania and the entire African continent. The adoption of Velvet - the multilingual and multimodal foundational model that we’re developing on the Leonardo Supercomputer managed by Cineca - in Swahili, custom-built in full collaboration with local institutions in order to meet the country’s specific needs, demonstrates how generative AI can be a crucial lever in accelerating digitalization, improving public services, and fostering socio-economic development,” emphasized Sandei.

Nkundwe M. Mwasaga, General Manager of ICTC, stated: “The collaboration with Almawave will make it possible to build a Swahili language model capable of supporting the public administration of the United Republic of Tanzania. The agreement covers a wide range of areas, including the development of professional skills that will support all phases of the creation and implementation of the Large Language Model. We’ll collaborate in the selection, collection, and cleaning of the right data sources, in order to prepare a high-quality Swahili dataset, and will exchange expertise regarding the implementation of the model.”