The Sahara Project

Region: West Africa

Competency: Educational Development, Human Language Technology

ILAD is involved in early-stage project planning with an under resourced language community residing in Northwest Africa. This community of people is largely surrounded by the Sahara Desert and has few development initiatives relative to the five million speaker population. Over the past two years, ILAD has worked with local stakeholders to develop writing system conventions for this traditionally oral language. With a consistent orthography now proposed, our team will continue to work alongside community members in order to help meet educational and technology needs, giving speakers to access critical information and growth opportunities. Some possibilities for future ILAD engagement include grassroots mother tongue literacy instruction, as well as development of digital mother tongue resources. The big picture is to better equip members of this group to engage with the languages and resources they need to advance the well-being of their families and communities without losing their unique identity of language and culture.