Mandla is an innovative, black owned e-learning language app created for those who seek to strengthen their unbreakable connection with their African roots.
Africa is the most linguistically diverse continent on Earth, with over
2000 languages and billions of native speakers. Despite recent advances
in online language learning, there remains no major education platform
that supports more than one or two African languages.
We, the Mandla Team, have decided to tackle this issue head on. Mandla
is an e-learning platform that aims to:
1. Teach African languages.
2. Build an African language database to improve translation
models.
3. Preserve Cultures.
Our entire team is composed of first generation African immigrants
from Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya. Growing up, we each
faced the problem of wanting to improve our fluency in our parents’
native languages and not being able to find any quality resources to do
so. And it wasn't just us; Many of our peers were facing this same
problem as well. In our quest to improve our fluency, we discovered
countless Instagram pages, YouTube channels, and reddit forums
dedicated to learning different African languages, but still no quality
gamified online platform. Mandla solves this problem.
We launched the beta versions of our iOS, Android, and web apps in
December 2021 with support for over 15 of Africa’s most spoken
languages and have quickly amassed over 50,000 users.