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African NLP Researcher Intern

Give Africa's languages a voice in AI

Nairobi, Kenya (Remote-Friendly)Unpaid internshipIntern

Internship format

Currently unpaid — built for candidates optimizing for impact, learning, and mission alignment.

About This Role

Most medical AI was built for English. We're fixing that. You'll research and develop NLP models for African languages — Swahili, Amharic, Yoruba, Hausa, Zulu, Kikuyu, and more — applying them to clinical conversation and patient communication contexts.

We are prioritizing builders who are deeply curious, mission-driven, and excited to grow fast while solving real African healthcare problems.

What You'll Do

  • Collect and curate African language medical text corpora
  • Fine-tune multilingual models (mBERT, XLM-R, AfriBERTa) on African clinical text
  • Build evaluation benchmarks for African language medical NLP
  • Develop culturally-aware conversation flows for patient communication
  • Research code-switching and dialect variation in clinical contexts
  • Collaborate on African language AI with regional NLP communities

Requirements

  • Strong background in NLP and computational linguistics
  • Proficiency in Python and HuggingFace ecosystem
  • Native or near-native fluency in at least one African language
  • Understanding of multilingual NLP challenges
  • Familiarity with language model evaluation metrics (BLEU, BERTScore)

Nice to Have

  • Contributions to Masakhane or similar African NLP initiatives
  • Experience with speech recognition (ASR) for African languages
  • Knowledge of low-resource NLP techniques
  • Academic research background in linguistics or computational linguistics

What You Get

  • Remote-friendly work arrangement
  • Co-authorship on NLP research papers
  • Access to unique African language datasets
  • Contribute to open-source African AI

Apply for This Role

We read every application ourselves. No recruiter filters — just careful review by the core team.

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