🌍Pan-African

AfriQA

Datasets

Cross-lingual open-retrieval question-answering dataset with human-translated QA pairs for 10 African languages (incl. Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba), totaling 12,159 examples across train/validation/test splits. From the Masakhane initiative.

AfriSpeech-200

Datasets

Pan-African accented English speech corpus of ~200 hours covering 120 African accents from 13 countries and 2,463 speakers across clinical and general domains, with per-accent configs. Released by Intron Health.

AfriSpeech-Dialog

Datasets

Conversational African-accented speech corpus (~6 hours) of 50 two-speaker dialogues across 11 accents (Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Swahili, Sesotho and others) from Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, for ASR and speaker diarization. By Intron Health.

MasakhaNER 2.0

Datasets

Largest high-quality named-entity-recognition corpus for 20 African languages (incl. Nigerian Pidgin, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba) with PER/ORG/LOC/DATE tags over news-domain text, totaling ~152,786 rows. Built by the Masakhane community.

MasakhaNEWS

Datasets

News-topic-classification dataset for 16 widely spoken African languages (incl. Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Nigerian Pidgin), ~31,088 rows in CSV/Parquet with train/val/test splits across seven topic categories. Built by the Masakhane community.

MasakhaPOS

Datasets

Part-of-speech tagging dataset for 20 African languages (incl. Nigerian Pidgin, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba) using Universal Dependencies tags, with per-language train/validation/test splits. Built by the Masakhane community.

AfTerFibre African Fibre Optic Network Map

Datasets

Open geodata mapping terrestrial and undersea fibre optic cable routes across Africa, digitised from operator maps into GIS format. The dataset is downloadable as CSV, SHP, KML, GeoJSON and SVG via the map portal and GitHub, and is also mirrored in the FAO data catalog. It is community-maintained by Steve Song under an open-data model.

AfriHate Hate Speech Datasets

Datasets

Multilingual collection of hate speech and abusive language datasets covering 15 African languages, built from tweets annotated by native speakers. Each instance carries labels from 3 to 4 annotators with anonymous annotator IDs, downloadable on HuggingFace. Published at NAACL 2025.

AfriMMLU (IrokoBench)

Datasets

Human-translated multiple-choice question-answering evaluation benchmark covering 16 to 17 African languages plus English and French, derived from a subset of MMLU across subjects like maths, geography and law. Distributed as CSV and parquet on HuggingFace and forms part of the IrokoBench suite (MMLU, MGSM, XNLI). Licensed Apache 2.0.

Africa Electricity Transmission & Distribution Grid Map

Datasets

Open GIS map of existing and planned electricity transmission and distribution lines for all continental African countries and Madagascar, tagged by voltage (sub-kV to 700kV) and status. Four downloadable resources cover combined, existing-only and planned-only lines as GeoJSON plus a Shapefile package. Published by the World Bank on ENERGYDATA.INFO under CC BY 4.0 and last updated September 2024.

Africapolis Urban Agglomerations (OECD/SWAC)

Datasets

Standardised geospatial database of urban agglomerations across all 54 African countries, built from censuses, electoral registers and satellite imagery. Each urban area is a polygon with population and built-up-area attributes, available in 2015 and 2020 versions. Data is downloadable as geospatial vector files from africapolis.org under CC BY 4.0.

Afrobarometer Survey Data

Datasets

Nationally representative public-attitude surveys on democracy, governance, the economy and society across roughly 39 African countries and nine survey rounds. Country-level and merged multi-country datasets are provided with codebooks in SPSS, Stata and CSV. Data is free to use; the most recent Round 9 covers 2021 to 2023.

DataFirst Open Data Portal (UCT)

Datasets

Research data service cataloguing African household, labour and census microdata, centred on South Africa but including other African countries, with full survey documentation and questionnaires. Microdata downloads (Stata, SPSS, CSV) require a free account and agreement to terms, while the catalog itself is openly browsable. Maintained by the University of Cape Town.

Digital Earth Africa Analysis-Ready EO Data

Datasets

Continental analysis-ready satellite data platform providing cropland extent, Water Observations from Space, coastline change, fractional cover and GeoMAD products for all of Africa. Data is served as Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF via a STAC API (explorer.digitalearth.africa/stac), OGC Web Services (ows.digitalearth.africa), an AWS S3 open bucket and a JupyterHub Sandbox. Products are derived from Landsat and Sentinel and are continuously updated.

FAO WaPOR (Water Productivity)

Datasets

Near-real-time remote-sensing database of evapotranspiration, biomass production and water productivity covering Africa and the Near East. Data is provided from continental to field scale (300m, 100m and 30m) as GeoTIFF and through an API, refreshed on a dekadal (10-day) cadence. Free and open access from FAO.

Google Open Buildings (Africa)

Datasets

Machine-learning building footprint dataset first released for Africa and now covering 1.8 billion detections, each with a polygon, confidence score and Plus Code. Africa is served both as the original continent-wide product and as per-country GeoParquet/GeoJSON extracts on HDX. Data downloads as CSV by S2 cell, via gsutil, Google Earth Engine or the web explorer; latest v3 is May 2023.

MAFAND-MT (masakhane/mafand)

Datasets

Largest news-domain machine translation benchmark for African languages, covering 21 languages with English or French as source. It contains 142,909 parallel sentences in parquet with train, dev and test splits, hosted on HuggingFace. Licensed CC BY-NC 4.0.

Sub-Saharan Africa Public Health Facilities Database

Datasets

Geocoded inventory of 98,745 public-sector health facilities assembled from national master facility lists across 50 sub-Saharan African countries and islands. Records include names, facility types, admin locations and coordinates, distributed as CSV via figshare and Harvard Dataverse. Published in Nature Scientific Data (2019) under CC BY 4.0.

TAHMO Weather Station Network

Datasets

Network of automatic weather stations across sub-Saharan Africa recording rainfall, temperature, humidity, wind and radiation at sub-daily intervals. Observations are accessed through an API and web portal under a data-sharing agreement, free for education and research. The station data itself is real but sits behind account credentials rather than an open download.

iSDAsoil Africa Soil Properties (30m)

Datasets

First continent-scale predictive soil property maps for Africa at 30m resolution, covering organic carbon, pH, texture class, sand, clay, stone content and nutrients at 0-20cm and 20-50cm depths. Each property is published as Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (mean and model error layers) on Zenodo under CC BY 4.0. Released 2021 by iSDA with ISRIC.