Maureen Awour

Moureen Awour is a Master's student at Maseno University, a Data Science Africa (DSA) Fellow, and a Research Associate at MCAAI. Her DSA fellowship reflects her standing as an emerging leader in the African data science community, and she brings the rigorous quantitative training of that programme to her work at MCAAI.

Moureen focuses on Dholuo corpus creation and data validation, ensuring that the speech and text data produced by the DhoNam and African Next Voices initiatives meets the rigorous linguistic and technical standards required before being released for open research use. Her validation work is systematic and data driven: she applies statistical quality metrics to incoming audio batches, uses inter annotator agreement analysis to assess transcription consistency, and develops automated pre screening pipelines that flag recordings for human review based on audio quality and transcription confidence scores.

Her data science background enriches the validation methodology she has introduced to MCAAI's corpus production pipeline. Prior to Moureen's contributions, quality assurance was largely manual; she has helped to systematise and partially automate the process, significantly increasing the throughput of validated data while maintaining high quality standards.

Moureen also contributes to MCAAI's broader community of practice, sharing her data science expertise with junior researchers through informal workshops and code review sessions. She is supervised by Dr. Vivian Oloo and works in close collaboration with Judith Odera and Martin Okech on the DhoNam corpus team.