NLP and AI Intern

About the role

The NLP and AI Intern will support the creation of English and Swahili language resources and early AI/NLP workflows for the FemDigiNomics project. This role is ideal for candidates with a background in computer science, data science, computational linguistics, AI or related fields who are passionate about ethical, community‑grounded AI.

Key responsibilities

• Collect, clean, translate, and annotate Swahili and mixed‑language narratives.
• Develop language categories covering savings, debt, chama obligations, business risk, care work, health shocks, and lending readiness.
• Test simple NLP workflows to classify women’s needs, barriers, and support pathways.
• Document language resources, annotation protocols, and model/testing outputs.
• Participate in responsible AI discussions on bias, explainability, privacy, and ethical use of women’s data.
• Collaborate with community and research teams to ensure tools reflect women’s real economic descriptions.

Required profile

• Background in computer science, data science, computational linguistics, AI, NLP, information systems, or related fields.
• Interest in African languages, especially Swahili and Sheng.
• Basic knowledge of Python, NLP libraries, machine learning, data annotation, or language data processing (advantageous).
• Strong commitment to ethical, community‑grounded AI.

Required skills

• Python
• NLP libraries (e.g., spaCy, NLTK)
• Machine Learning
• Data analysis
• Information security
• Artificial intelligence (AI)