Building Kiswahili's digital foundation
Kamusi Research Labs is a non-profit research lab based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, dedicated to Swahili language research and digital preservation — with a specific focus on making sure the next billion Swahili speakers inherit a language that works fully in digital spaces, in both its scripts.
A digitally complete Kiswahili
Kiswahili is spoken by well over 200 million people and is an official or national language across East Africa and beyond. Yet most of the tooling that makes a language usable online — spellcheckers, editors, standards, search, input methods — is either missing, incomplete, or built as an afterthought on top of English-first systems. We think a language spoken this widely deserves better, and we're building it.
How we work
Research first
Every tool starts from linguistic research — into Standard Swahili grammar and orthography, and into the historic conventions of Swahili Ajami — before a line of production code is written.
Two scripts, one standard
We don't treat Ajami as a niche feature bolted onto Latin-script software. Our tools are designed so Ajami and Latin Kiswahili are equally native, equally well-supported outputs.
Open by default
Our research, tools and datasets are released as open source under the @kamusi-org organization on GitHub, so institutions and other researchers can build on our work rather than start from zero.
A script isn't a footnote, it's a first language
For centuries before European colonization, Kiswahili was primarily written in Ajami — a modified Arabic script used across the Swahili Coast for poetry, correspondence, Islamic scholarship and trade. Latin orthography, standardized under colonial administration in the twentieth century, became dominant — and Ajami was gradually pushed out of schools, government and eventually the internet. We think a full digital future for Kiswahili has to include the script that carried it for the longest part of its written history.
Based in Dar es Salaam, working with anyone, anywhere
Our home base is Kibada, Kigamboni, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania — though the team works remotely and we collaborate with researchers, institutions and volunteers wherever they are.