🌍Pan-African

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.

GSMA Mobile Economy Africa 2025

Research

GSMA Intelligence's Mobile Economy Africa 2025 report quantifies the mobile industry's economic and social contribution across the continent. It reports that the mobile sector contributed 220 billion US dollars, about 7.7 percent of GDP, in 2024, and projects growth toward 270 billion dollars by 2030. The report also covers 4G and 5G adoption, the mobile internet usage gap, and AI and satellite connectivity trends.

GSMA Mobile Money API Specification

Research

The GSMA Mobile Money API is a harmonised, industry-governed REST and JSON specification covering common mobile money use cases such as merchant payments, disbursements, P2P and international transfers, bill payments and account linking. It defines a standard set of transaction types abstracted from provider-specific implementations and ships a developer portal with a sandbox simulator, an OAuth 2.0 gateway and SDKs. Version 1.2 is the current release.

GSMA State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026

Research

The GSMA State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money is the industry's definitive annual reference, prepared by the GSMA Mobile Money programme. The 2026 edition (published March 2026) reports that more than 2 trillion US dollars flowed through mobile money in 2025 and that the industry reached 2.3 billion registered accounts, up by 268 million. Most new registered and active accounts came from Sub-Saharan Africa, the industry's largest region.

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.

IrokoBench

AI

IrokoBench is a human-translated evaluation benchmark for 16 typologically diverse African languages covering three tasks: natural language inference (AfriXNLI), knowledge QA (AfriMMLU) and mathematical reasoning (AfriMGSM). It is widely used to measure the performance gap between English and African languages in large language models. It was released by the Masakhane community and published at NAACL 2025.

IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Models

Research

IrokoBench is a human-translated evaluation benchmark covering 17 typologically diverse low-resource African languages across three tasks: natural language inference (AfriXNLI), mathematical reasoning (AfriMGSM) and knowledge-based multiple-choice QA (AfriMMLU). The paper evaluates open and proprietary LLMs and documents a large gap between high-resource languages and African languages, with the best open model reaching about 63 percent of GPT-4o performance. It was published at NAACL 2025.

Jumia Seller MCP Server

MCP

Community MCP server that connects an AI assistant to the Jumia Vendor API, providing access to catalogs, shops, product feeds, the Jumia Express fulfilment program and order management. Jumia is the largest pan-African e-commerce marketplace, and no e-commerce seller MCP is otherwise present in the registry.

Level One Project Guide (Gates Foundation)

Research

The Level One Project Guide is the Gates Foundation reference model for inclusive instant payment systems and pro-poor digital financial services. It sets out principles and a reference architecture for real-time retail payments that connect banks and non-bank providers through a shared national switch, and it informed the design of Mojaloop. The current guide edition was published in 2025.

Lugha-Llama

AI

Lugha-Llama is a Llama-3.1-8B model continually pretrained on the WURA African-language corpus to lift performance on low-resource African languages. It ships in three variants (wura, wura_edu, wura_math) and reaches leading results among similarly sized models on the IrokoBench and AfriQA African-language benchmarks. It was built by researchers at Princeton University.

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.

MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform) Specifications

Research

MOSIP is a modular open-source foundational digital identity platform that governments use to build national ID systems while retaining ownership and avoiding vendor lock-in. Its specifications build on open standards including OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, OpenAPI, ISO/IEC 19794 biometrics and CBEFF, and add the Claim 169 QR specification for offline identity verification. It is used by multiple African governments as the basis of their foundational digital ID programmes.

MTN MoMo Open API

APIs

MTN Mobile Money developer platform exposing Collections (Get Paid), Disbursements (Pay), Remittances and account APIs across MTN's African markets. Offers a self-service sandbox and documentation, with production access approved per country. MTN MoMo is one of the largest mobile money networks on the continent.

MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition

Research

MasakhaNER 2.0 introduces the largest human-annotated named entity recognition dataset for 20 African languages and studies Africa-centric cross-lingual transfer learning. The paper reports that choosing the best transfer language improves zero-shot F1 by an average of 14 points across the 20 languages compared with transferring from English.

MoMo MCP Server

MCP

Community MCP server for MTN Mobile Money that exposes MoMo payment operations as tools an MCP client can call, with approval gates, spend limits, idempotency, an audit log and a kill switch. It targets the MTN MoMo sandbox and includes an explicit safety test suite. MTN Mobile Money is a pan-African mobile wallet used across Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, Cameroon and other markets.

Mojaloop Open API for FSP Interoperability Specification

Research

The Mojaloop specification set defines an open API for interoperable transactions between financial service providers, enabling a payer at one provider to pay a payee at another. It documents the FSP Interoperability (FSPIOP), Administration, Settlement and Third-party Payment Initiation APIs and is published under a Creative Commons license. It is the reference standard behind several national instant payment switches used in Africa and beyond.

NileChat-3B

AI

NileChat-3B is a 3B-parameter LLM built on Qwen2.5-3B and adapted for Egyptian and Moroccan communities, handling Egyptian and Moroccan dialectal Arabic in both Arabic script and Arabizi alongside Modern Standard Arabic, French and English. It was trained with controlled synthetic data and translated corpora and outperforms its Qwen2.5-3B baseline on Arabic benchmarks. It was released by the UBC Deep Learning and NLP Lab and accepted at EMNLP 2025.

Orange Money MCP Server

MCP

Community MCP server for Orange Money WebPay covering Senegal plus 10 Francophone West and Central African countries, with 8 tools for web payments, status checks, cash-in and cash-out. It uses OAuth2 client-credentials auth and is published to npm as @theyahia/orange-money-mcp. Orange Money is one of the largest mobile money networks across Francophone Africa.

Orange Money Web Payment API

APIs

Orange's official API on its developer portal for accepting online payments through Orange Money mobile wallets. Covers 11 African countries including Mali, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, Madagascar, Guinea, Sierra Leone and DR Congo, with customers validating purchases via a USSD one-time password. Integration requires an Orange partner agreement.

Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages

Research

This landmark Masakhane paper proposes a participatory research model that lets non-specialist speakers meaningfully contribute to building machine translation for their own languages. The work released novel translation datasets and MT benchmarks for more than 30 African languages, with human evaluations for about a third of them. It was published in Findings of EMNLP 2020.

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.

World Bank ID4D Practitioner's Guide

Research

The ID4D Practitioner's Guide is the World Bank's reference for designing and implementing inclusive, trusted digital identification systems, organised around the Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development. It covers system design, technology choices, procurement and governance, and is a core reference for identity as digital public infrastructure. The ID4D initiative focuses heavily on low- and middle-income countries, with much of its flagship work in Africa.

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.