Health
Clinical documentation, patient intake, maternal health, public health and frontline care.
Patient health
Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge
The Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge
Prize pool
$10,000 USD
Build voice models that understand code-switching, local accents, and real-world noise.
The Sahara CodeSwitch
Africa Challenge
invites developers, startups, researchers, product teams, and builders across Africa to help solve one of the biggest unsolved problems in voice AI. Use Sahara’s new code-switching APIs. Build real applications. Benchmark what works. Help surface how well current speech models handle code-switched audio in real-world settings.
Prize pool
$10,000 USD
Registration opens
5 August 2026
Registration closes
15 September 2026
Winners announced
1 October 2026
The Challenge Task
Create or improve a real-world voice AI application
The transcript received can be used to perform a downstream task. Examples include a voice assistant that completes a booking, a voice-driven triage tool, a spoken-language form-filler, or a voice interface that takes an action on a user’s behalf.
Each submission must:
- Use voice to achieve a downstream task (the agentic component), not simply convert speech to text.
- Benchmark performance on code-switched audio input across at least three speech models, including an Intron Sahara API, and at least two other models of the team’s choice (global, local, open-source, commercial, pretrained or fine-tuned).
- Target a specific vertical or use case (see categories below).
- Where possible and permitted, submit code-switched audio samples used for testing, with basic metadata (language pair, domain, accent/country, device type, noise conditions).
Competition Categories
Five tracks designed for real-world impact across Africa.
Health
Clinical documentation, patient intake, community health, maternal health, public health, hospital workflows, and frontline care.
Legal & Public Services
Court transcription, legal aid, citizen services, civic reporting, complaints, justice access, and public-sector workflows.
Fintech, Telco & Customer Experience
Voice banking, KYC, payments, collections, customer support, call centers, agent assist, and customer insights.
Agriculture & Education
Farmer advisory, extension services, tutoring, classroom learning, local-language education, and skills training.
Other High-Impact Use Cases
Humanitarian response, accessibility, media, religious services, commerce, transport, culture, and any meaningful use of code-switching voice AI.
Legal & Public Services
Court transcription, legal aid, citizen services, complaints and justice-access workflows.
Case file
Fintech, Telco & Customer Experience
Voice banking, KYC, payments, collections, call centres and customer support.
Payment confirmed
Agriculture & Education
Farmer advisory, tutoring, classroom learning, local-language education and skills training.
Growth and learning
Other High-Impact Use Cases
Accessibility, media, commerce, transport, culture and meaningful code-switching applications.
Connected services
Competition Resources
In August, Intron is releasing Sahara v2.5 in beta (research preview), focused on bilingual code-switching across 12 African language pairs.
Who should enter
Applications are open to builders across Africa and the diaspora. Apply as a solo builder or as a team. We especially encourage:
Bonus points will be given to solutions addressing a real problem for a meaningful population size.
Submissions can include fresh ideas, production apps, apps close to deployment, etc clearly designed for real world use.
Team Formation
You can apply as an individual or as a team.
Teams may include developers, researchers, designers, domain experts, product managers, linguists, clinicians, customer-support operators, field workers, or anyone who understands the problem you are solving.
Recommended team size: 2–5 people.
What to Submit
Keep it concise. Focus on impact, execution, and responsible use.
-
1
Problem & Solution
A short description of the problem and your proposed solution.
-
2
Working Prototype
A short video demo of a working prototype or integrated application.
-
3
Code & Docs
Code or technical documentation for your implementation.
-
4
Benchmark Results
Comparing Sahara against at least three other speech models.
-
5
Responsible AI
A note on privacy, consent, safety, and responsible data use.
Deployment
v1.2.0 – Stable
Health
Edge Runtime
99.9%
SSL Certification active
12:45:01
Database migration 100%
12:45:03
CDN Edge propagation...
Running
✓
Live in production
0.4ms
How You Are Judged
Five dimensions evaluated by partners, sponsors, and technical experts.
Real-world Impact
Does it address a meaningful user need for a large target population?
Code-switching
Performance across multilingual environments and natural code-switching scenarios.
Product Quality
Usability, workflow fit and user trust in the final experience.
Technical Execution
Reliability, integration, latency and robustness in real environments.
Ethics & Safety
Consent, inclusion, privacy, bias and respect for user dignity.
Drag or swipe
01/05
Prizes
A total cash prize pool plus non-cash opportunities for finalists.
Timeline
Key milestones from launch to winner announcements.
Phase 1 · Indaba sprint
3–7 August
Launch to winners in five days
Phase 2 · Main competition
14 August–1 October
Onboarding, building, benchmarking and Demo Day
Phase 1 · The MLC (Africa) × Intron Agentic Voice AI Challenge
5-day sprint
Launch + registration
Challenge announced during Deep Learning Indaba and registration opens.
Submission deadline
Final entries for the workshop challenge are due.
Finalists + winners
Finalists and winner(s) are announced at the workshop.
Phase 2 · Main competition
Full build
EOI closes
Registration and Expression of Interest deadline.
15 August–15 September
Build period
Team formation, onboarding, API access, building and benchmarking.
Final submission
Completed solutions and supporting materials are due.
Late September 2026
Selection + Demo Day
Screening, finalist selection and Partner Demo Day.
Winners announced
The Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge concludes.
PARTNER DEMO DAY
Finalists will pitch live to challenge partners, judges, sponsors, funders, and ecosystem leaders.
This is where top teams can showcase their applications, share benchmark results, meet potential collaborators, and explore follow-on pilots, funding, incubation, or co-deployment opportunities.
MEET THE JUDGES
Our judging panel will include leaders from AI research, African languages, fintech, health, public-interest technology, responsible AI, product deployment, and the startup ecosystem.
Fatima Tambanja
NVIDIA
Kehinde Adefehinti
Wema Bank
Olamide Jolaoso
Wema Bank
Ayo Oluleye
ARM
Adanne Anene
Branch International
Olumide Okunbadejo
ESIEE Paris
Mercy Muchai
Microsoft Research Africa
Rouella Mendonca
Audere
Peter Ameh
Helium Health
Tosin Felix
Helium Health
Ezekiel Boro
LSTM
Stephanie Okpere
CcHUB
Ambika
Gooey
Millicent Ochieng
Microsoft Research Africa
Stephanie Nyairo
Microsoft Research Africa
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Felermino Ali
Microsoft Research Africa
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Kome Sideso
CcHUB Namibia
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01 / 21
PARTNERS AND SPONSORS
The Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge is supported by organisations committed to building inclusive voice AI for Africa.
PARTNERSHIP OPPORTUNITIES
We are inviting selected partners to support the challenge in three ways.
Become a partner
Amplify
Spread the challenge through your platforms, newsletters, communities, events, social channels, and developer networks.
Judges
Nominate judges per category to evaluate finalists through a technical, sector, language inclusion, responsible AI, product, or deployment-readiness lens.
Named Mission Prize
Contribute from $1,000 to $20,000 to sponsor a named prize aligned with your mission or sector priority.
ABOUT THE HOSTS
Intron’s core technology is speech recognition built for African accents. Intron has created Africa’s largest and most diverse speech dataset, supporting transcription across 700+ African accents, with over 6M+ audio clips contributed by more than 70,000 Africans across 13 countries.
In healthcare, the technology removes the barrier that keeps busy hospitals from digitising: manual keyboard entry. In the judiciary, it reduces the documentation burden on judges during hearings, preserving testimony integrity in an overburdened system. Intron’s Sahara models are in production with partners including Penda Health, ARM, Branch, Carbon, Data.FI, and State High Courts across Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Eswatini.
Learn more at intron.io
About Sahara v2.5
Sahara v2.5 is Intron’s next-generation voice AI release, built around the world’s first bilingual code-switching support across 12 African language pairs, the first African trilingual model, and fluent speech generation in 12 African languages. It launches alongside this challenge in August 2026.
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