tags: - vision-language-model - speech-recognition - text-to-speech - low-resource - african-languages - healthcare-ai - responsible-ai - moore - dioula - fulfulde - french
CITADEL — Centre d'Excellence IA · Burkina Faso
Sole AI4D Africa laureate from francophone Africa · IDRC/CRDI · 2021–2027
Developing contextual, responsible AI solutions for African development challenges.
🏛️ Who we are
CITADEL (Centre d'Excellence Interdisciplinaire en Intelligence Artificielle pour le Développement) is an interdisciplinary AI excellence center based in Burkina Faso. We build AI that works for Africa — designed for local languages, local infrastructure, and local realities.
🔬 Research areas
| Domain | Focus |
|---|---|
| Vision-Language Models | Radiology assistance, document AI, property taxation from building imagery |
| Speech & Language | ASR & TTS for underrepresented West African languages |
| Healthcare AI | AI-assisted diagnostics, telemedicine, epidemiological surveillance |
| Responsible AI | Ethics-aware, offline-capable, low-resource systems for African contexts |
🗣️ Languages we work with
Mooré · Dioula · Fulfulde · Goulmatchema · French · English
📚 Master of Excellence Program
A competitive AI master coordinated through UV-BF, now reaching 15 countries across francophone Africa.
- 📈 Cohort growth: 60 → 138 applicants
- 🌐 Students from Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Sénégal, Mali, Cameroon, and beyond
- 🎓 Research-integrated curriculum in responsible AI development
📦 What you'll find here
- Multilingual speech corpora for West African languages
- Fine-tuned VLMs for radiology and document understanding
- NLP benchmarks and evaluation datasets for low-resource languages
- Open-source tools for AI in resource-constrained environments
🤝 Partners
Building AI that works for Africa, built by Africans.