Rooted in Africa. Building the digital home for its languages.
The Meaning and Significance of the Name “Khaya”
Khaya stands for the "African Mahogany" Tree - Khaya Senegalensis. It is in use by many African communities for a variety of purposes - furniture, medicinal, etc. We thought it was a good metaphor for how useful we envision our product to be. Khaya also stands for "home" in several African languages, which is another entendre. Khaya AI aims to be a sustaining resource for Africans in the digital future. Khaya AI is building a digital home for African languages, a strong, sustaining, and deeply rooted resource for Africa's digital future.
“Bridging Words, Empowering Communities, One Language at a Time”
The Khaya AI Team
The Founding and Inspiration Behind Khaya AI
About five years ago, a group of Ghanaian researchers united to address the lack of language technologies for Ghanaian languages on major platforms like Google and Microsoft. We built the app Khaya, which was well received in Ghana and highlighted a wider need across Africa. Growing from GhanaNLP’s open-source efforts to preserve African languages, Khaya AI was founded to scale this mission. Our company focuses on delivering enterprise-grade solutions while retaining our community-driven, open-source roots, with a strong commitment to African ownership of language data and technology in the digital space.
Khaya AI’s Mission
Our mission is to build a digital home for African languages and bridge the digital divide by creating human-centered language technologies that understand and speak the languages of our communities. We aim to empower millions of people to access information, education, and opportunities in the languages they know best, enabling African cultures and communities to flourish and shaping the future of natural language processing through an African lens.
Our Story Timeline
Achievements & impact
Text-to-Speech
Our Text-to-Speech tools currently cover 32 languages - that is more than approximately 350 million people across Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, Sierra Leone & Zimbabwe.
First of it’s Kind
We were the first to put out translation, text to speech or ASR production systems for any Ghanaian language, and several Kenyan and Nigerian languages.
Performing Models
We currently have the best performing models in the area of translation, automatic speech recognition and text to speech and undisputed African language tech pioneers.
UNESCO Win
We recently won a UNESCO related award in 2025 for our work.
Khaya AI’s Vision for the Next Decade
We imagine a future where every low-resourced language, no matter how obscure, has a home, true to the meaning of Khaya. Building on the progress we have made with Ghanaian languages, we aim to extend these successes across Africa, beginning with countries such as Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone.
We aim to build a future where language is never a barrier for Africans in communicating with others or with AI. Our vision is to remain at the forefront of global language AI innovation by creating solutions that go beyond simply adapting existing technologies.
We seek to drive original breakthroughs rooted in Africa’s unique contexts and needs. In doing so, we want to demonstrate that Ghanaian innovators can build wealth for their communities, lead the world in cutting-edge research, and shape a future where
Africans take full ownership of their languages in every aspect, from preservation to technological advancement.
The Problem Khaya AI is Solving
Africa faces a major risk of being left behind in the digital future due to the limited online representation of its languages. In Ghana, for example, over 50 languages are largely invisible to online tools and services, creating a deep digital divide that disconnects millions from essential information and opportunities, from education to emergency support.
Khaya exists to change this. Founded five years ago when no major platform supported Ghanaian languages, Khaya is building AI-powered language technologies to connect African voices to the digital world. Our coverage already surpasses many global platforms. We prioritize cultural relevance and community empowerment, ensuring African languages and cultures thrive, evolve, and share in the benefits of the digital age by using technology to translate, preserve, and teach them.
What Makes Khaya’s Technology Unique
What sets Khaya apart is the expertise in data that we collect ourselves by experts in the languages, along with a curation of some of the best brains in the field when it comes to NLP in Ghana and Africa. Our API stands out for its quality and performance, offering reliable access to the most advanced African language technologies available. The models and products are developed and tested by people who know the languages these tools are built for.
This deep, human-in-the-loop collaboration allows our technology to capture the nuance, context, and culture that many competing solutions often overlook. The result is not just higher accuracy or better performance, but technology that feels authentic and truly serves its users. Also, our community-centered design and development approach ensures that our solutions address real local needs while maintaining high levels of accuracy. By curating high-quality data, we create models that are more efficient, smaller, and less energy intensive.












