The partnership will leverage Meta’s open source Large Language Model, Meta AI.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has partnered with Data Science Africa, a data science and artificial organisation, for the Llama Impact Grant, a funding initiative designed to support startups and researchers in Sub-saharan Africa.
This initiative will leverage Meta’s open source Large Language Model Meta AI, (Llama), to develop innovative solutions that will meet the region’s needs.
With a focus on economic and social impact, this project will feature proposals from organisations across health, science and agricultural sector. The selected proposal will receive $20,000 to bring their ideas to life.
Llama is a series of open source developed by Meta in 2023. It is designed to power natural language processing (NLP) applications including chat bots, content generation, translation and more.
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With over 1 billion downloads globally, Meta’s Llama models including the latest Llama 3 which was launched in April 2024, have been used by various companies to provide solutions ranging from localised educational materials to providing access to medical information.
The Llama 3 model is also integrated into the Meta platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, bringing new features for a better AI assistance.
Launched in October 2023, the Llama Impact Grant programme aims to address critical global challenges in areas like education and innovation through AI powered solutions.
Since its inception, the grant has received more than 800 applications from over 90 countries.
One of the beneficiaries of this grant programme is the Digital Green’s Farmers Chat project, with goals to develop an AI chat box which would provide customised agricultural advisory services to small scale farmers across Sub-saharan Africa in multiple languages including Swahili and Hindi.
Another beneficiary is Jacaranda Health which looks to enhance its digital health prompts that offers SMS-like clinical guidance to expecting mothers across Ghana, Kenya and Eswatini. It majorly focuses on maternal and new-born health support.
Evaluations for the proposal will be based off of a compelling use case for Llama, a concise move for potential user base growth, a realistic budget, team management and expertise, and ethical product development.
