The Republic, is proud to announce that we’ve just won $250,000 in grant funding from the JournalismAI Innovation Challenge!

The JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, supported by the Google News Initiative, aims to fund projects/tools from news publishers to help fight misinformation and disinformation, experiment with new formats across mobile, video and audio and identify ways to grow subscription and support diverse forms of revenue. 

This year, The Republic is one of 35 grantees selected from 712 applications from around the world. Of the 35 grantees, 25 ideas have been awarded $50,000 each, while 10 ideas including The Republic’s have been awarded $250,000 each.

Globally, digital newsrooms have an indigenous language problem. Despite Africa being home to approximately one-third of the world’s languages with approximately 2,000 languages, most of these languages are underrepresented in the media. According to The Republic’s founder, Wale Lawal, ‘The Republic is on a mission to change this.’

With online news surpassing radio and television globally as the major source of news, indigenous language speakers are unable to benefit from this growth. With the internet being 52.1 per cent English, Indigenous languages are not being catered for in the media. By contrast, Swahili which is the most-spoken language in Africa has one per cent presence on the internet.

To solve this problem, our AI-driven project, supported by funding from the JournalismAI innovation challenge and the Google News Initiative, will focus on bridging this gap by helping newsrooms to reach more audiences, enabling audiences to have more access to credible information relayed in their indigenous languages⎈