African expertise first
Every label is placed by someone who holds the context — language, sector, and lived reality — not a generalist guessing at it.
About Ruach AI
Built in Africa. Built for Africa.
We are building the expert-labeled data infrastructure that makes AI accurate across African languages, domains, and institutional realities.
Our position
Ruach AI is Africa’s data labeling, annotation, and model evaluation infrastructure. We are headquartered in Nairobi, at the centre of one of the continent’s fastest-growing technology ecosystems.
Our annotator network spans Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, and South Africa. Every dataset is built by African domain experts and governed under African data sovereignty frameworks.
Africa contributes less than one percent of global AI training data. AI systems deployed here still operate on borrowed knowledge — built somewhere else, for someone else. Ruach AI exists to change that permanently.
Mission
Make AI in Africa work with African knowledge.
Our mission is to produce, validate, and govern the expert-labeled data that African AI systems are built on — so that models deployed on the continent are accurate in its languages, its institutions, and its realities.
Story
From a Nairobi conviction to continental infrastructure.
Ruach AI was founded in Nairobi on a simple observation: global AI pipelines treat Africa as a market to deploy into, not a source of knowledge to learn from. The result is systems that fail at Swahili code-switching, misread African medical records, and misjudge African markets.
We started with expert annotators and a measurement-first methodology. Today the Ruach Data Platform spans six integrated modules — from curation to governed vault — and our expert network spans the continent.
Values
Measured quality
Agreement scores, arbitration thresholds, and versioned outputs ship with every dataset. Trust is documented, not claimed.
Sovereignty by default
African data processed on African-hosted infrastructure, governed under African frameworks, with movement controlled at every step.
Built for the long term
We are infrastructure. Our work outlives individual models, clients, and market cycles.
Leadership
Oirere Newton
Founder & CEO
Building Africa’s data infrastructure for AI. Former communications strategist, founder of Moran PR & Communications, and co-founder of Mawingu, Africa’s geospatial intelligence platform.
Mary Omukami
Head of Data Science & Engineering
Leads Ruach AI’s technical infrastructure, annotation methodology, and quality control systems.
Careers
Help build the foundation.
We are hiring data engineers, annotation specialists, African language NLP researchers, and experts in agriculture, healthcare, and finance.
Start a project
Build AI that works in Africa.
Begin with a pilot dataset, documented quality scores, and an output ready for model training.