Help us save languages before they disappear
Hundreds of African and native languages are at risk of extinction. Many have never been written down, and the people who still speak them fluently are growing older. Nzonza Foundation exists to record those voices and turn them into a permanent, open archive — and we rely entirely on donations to do it.
Make a donation
Any amount helps. Give once, or set up a monthly gift — recurring support is what lets us plan fieldwork months ahead instead of one trip at a time.
We're still building our full donation platform. A proper funding page — with giving tiers, recurring plans, project-specific campaigns and public progress reports — is in the works. In the meantime, if you'd like to help right now, the link above is the fastest way to donate, and every contribution goes straight into the work described below.
Where your donation actually goes
We don't ask for money in the abstract. Here is exactly what it pays for, and how each piece contributes to preserving and documenting African and other native languages.
Recording equipment
Field-grade microphones, recorders, headphones, memory cards, power banks and solar chargers, specified for low-connectivity regions. Good audio is the difference between a recording a linguist can work with and one that is lost.
Recording our elders
In fragile languages, elders are frequently the last speakers with full command of vocabulary, idiom and register. Collection stipends let us sit with them and record words, proverbs, folktales, songs and oral history — in their own voice, before that knowledge goes with them.
Regional field coordinators
Moving from volunteer capacity to professional throughput. Coordinators travel into communities, work through local elders, teachers, associations and radio stations, and make sure participation is voluntary, informed and credited.
Transcription capacity
Audio that has never been transcribed is an archive, not a dataset. Funding builds the tooling, conventions and trained local transcribers that turn recordings into time-aligned text — the single biggest gap between what exists today and what a model can be trained on.
Expert linguistic review
Every entry is reviewed by native speakers and, where the language warrants it, by a linguist, before it is published. That review is what separates a trustworthy dataset from a word list.
Training and capacity building
Equipping youth, educators and local teams with digital and AI skills. The same people become the transcribers, reviewers and coordinators the dataset needs — expertise stays in the community.
Platform, API and data infrastructure
The dictionary, the app and the database run on paid servers and storage. Audio files are heavy and the collection grows every month. Donations keep it online, free to use, and open to developers through a public API.
Long-term archival hosting
Backups in more than one place, open and durable file formats, and structured metadata — so this material is still readable and usable decades from now, not stranded on a dead hard drive.
From a voice to a permanent record
Preservation isn't a single act — it's a chain, and a donation moves a language through all of it.
- 01
We go to the community
We identify a language at risk, make contact with speakers and elders, and travel to them — most of this work happens where the language is still spoken, not in an office.
- 02
We record the voice
Words, phrases, proverbs, folktales, songs and oral history, captured as clean audio with the speaker's consent and proper credit.
- 03
We document and verify
Each recording is transcribed, translated, and reviewed with native speakers so the meaning and pronunciation are right — not approximated.
- 04
We publish it, free
Verified entries go into the public dictionary and database, where anyone — a grandchild, a teacher, a researcher — can find them and use them.
- 05
We archive it for good
Everything is backed up in durable formats so the record outlives our equipment, our servers, and us.
Our commitment to you
Language data is community property, not a commodity. These are the rules the project holds itself to.
- Community-sourced and community-verified. Contributions come from native speakers; entries are reviewed by speakers and experts before publication.
- Attribution and consent. Contributors and recordists are credited and take part voluntarily, with a clear understanding of how the data will be used and licensed.
- Open licensing. Data is published under terms that guarantee permanent public access and prevent enclosure by any single commercial actor.
- African-led. Governance, direction and the majority of contribution come from the continent and its diaspora, not from external institutions studying it.
- Correctability. Communities can challenge and correct entries about their own language. The dataset is a living record, not a colonial-era vocabulary list.
- Return to source. Where the dataset generates commercial revenue, a defined share is committed back to fieldwork and to the communities whose knowledge made it possible.
Where your donation sits
Nzonza Foundation runs on two deliberately separated arms. Donations go to the non-profit arm — documentation, community fieldwork, training, and the open dataset with its permanent public archive. Everything that arm produces is published openly and stays open. A separate commercial arm sells data services and learning products built on top of the open core, and exists to fund fieldwork rather than to close the archive. Read the full model.
Why the timing matters
A language doesn't disappear all at once. It goes quiet one speaker at a time. Every year we wait, recordings we could have made become recordings we never will. That's the whole reason we're asking.
Can't donate? Still help.
Contribute a recording in your mother tongue, introduce us to an elder or a speaker community, or lend us equipment and expertise.
Fill out the formEvery donation records a voice that would otherwise be lost
Donate NowQuestions, partnerships, or want a breakdown of how funds are used? info@nzonza.org