What is the name of your organization?
Yekola Inc
What is the name of your solution?
Aunty Kola
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Aunty Kola is a culturally grounded AI preserving and teaching African and low-resource languages through audio, story, and community.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Toronto, ON, Canada
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
Canada
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Despite the linguistic richness of the African continent, over 2,000 African languages remain underrepresented—or entirely excluded—from digital learning platforms. Millions of learners across Africa and the diaspora lack access to culturally relevant education in their native or heritage languages. This deepens educational inequities, accelerates language loss, and disconnects communities from their cultural roots.
Globally, UNESCO estimates that 40% of students are taught in a language they do not speak. In African contexts, learners often study in colonial languages, which impacts comprehension and long-term academic success. Meanwhile, diaspora youth face cultural alienation, while elders struggle to pass down language and tradition in a digitized world.
Aunty Kola is a culturally grounded AI that preserves and teaches low-resource languages through audio-first learning and community storytelling. Beyond education, our long-term vision is to build a language infrastructure API that enables multilingual support across sectors like healthcare, finance, and public services. Imagine a Nigerian mother in Canada navigating a banking app in Yoruba with Aunty Kola’s help.
We’re not just preserving languages—we’re building a future where African & low-resource languages have full digital agency.
What is your solution?
Aunty Kola is an AI-powered platform that preserves and teaches African and low-resource languages using an audio-first, community-driven approach. By combining Federated Learning and ethical AI principles, we empower users to control and generate their own data, ensuring that language learning is localized and culturally authentic.
Users interact with Aunty Kola through short audio lessons, conversational prompts, and cultural stories, often shared by community members or elders. The AI personalizes learning experiences based on individual fluency and learning styles, utilizing Federated Learning to improve the AI model without centralizing sensitive user data. This approach ensures AI sovereignty, enabling communities to preserve and protect their linguistic data while benefiting from advanced, localized technology.
Aunty Kola also connects users through group chats and voice-based discussions, fostering a collaborative learning environment. In the long term, we aim to build a multilingual API to integrate African languages into critical industries like healthcare, finance, and public services, ensuring equitable access for underserved communities.
By combining ethical AI, community-driven data, and cultural immersion, Aunty Kola makes low-resource languages accessible, empowering, and sustainable for learners globally.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Aunty Kola serves learners, diaspora communities, and language stewards from low-resource language backgrounds, with an initial focus on African languages. These communities are often underserved in digital and educational spaces, where their languages are not represented or prioritized, resulting in cultural disconnection and limited access to essential services.
Diaspora Communities: Immigrant families, particularly those speaking low-resource languages, face language barriers and cultural isolation in new environments. Aunty Kola helps bridge these gaps by providing language learning tools in their native languages, enabling better integration and access to essential services like healthcare and education.
Language Learners: Students and lifelong learners from low-resource language backgrounds often struggle to find appropriate learning resources. Aunty Kola offers a personalized, culturally relevant platform that empowers users to reconnect with and preserve their heritage languages.
Elders and Cultural Stewards: Elders who hold valuable linguistic and cultural knowledge are often without platforms to pass it down to younger generations. Aunty Kola enables these stewards to preserve and share their languages, ensuring that critical cultural knowledge is not lost.
Starting with African languages, Aunty Kola aims to expand its impact globally, helping low-resource language communities reclaim, learn, and preserve their languages for future generations.
