HAIDI at MCAAI
Africa's first continent-wide coordination platform ensuring that AI development is grounded in inclusive design and directly shaped by disability communities across the continent.
HAIDI was established through a consortium of four institutions spanning Kenya, Ghana, and pan-African civil society. Rather than building one tool in one country, HAIDI coordinates evidence, innovation, and governance across Africa simultaneously — because disability inclusion in AI requires all three to move together.
Objectives
Building the Evidence Base
Developing Africa-centric disability datasets and data governance frameworks to enable inclusive AI development that reflects the realities of disability communities across the continent.
Innovation & Scaling
Selecting and scaling high-potential AI innovations that expand opportunities for persons with disabilities — from idea to deployment, with direct community validation through the Live Lab Network.
Governance Integration
Embedding disability rights and accessibility standards into national and regional AI governance frameworks across Africa, ensuring policy keeps pace with — and actively guides — innovation.
Turning policy into working technology
Within HAIDI, MCAAI leads the evidence and data governance workstream — and demonstrates what that evidence enables in practice. Our AI4KSL system translates spoken English into Kenyan Sign Language avatar animations in real time, trained on a dataset of over 20,000 annotated sign language videos.
This work directly advances inclusive education and workplace accessibility for deaf and hard-of-hearing communities in Kenya — and provides a replicable model for other HAIDI partners working on comparable language and communication access challenges across the continent.
20K+
Annotated KSL videos
The AI4KSL training dataset — one of the largest Kenyan Sign Language computational datasets in existence — built at MCAAI as part of the HAIDI evidence base programme.
Get Involved
Partner with HAIDI or collaborate with MCAAI
Whether you are a disability-inclusive AI venture seeking funding, a researcher interested in the evidence base programme, or an institution looking to embed accessibility into AI governance — there is a role for you in HAIDI.