Sounds like your project is for southern American English presumably including African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), and for regional accents in the African continent specifically for the English language.
Despite being focused on English, your project could be of interest for their funding. It's probably worth reaching out to let them know about your work.
We as an industry should not be working or associating with Bill Gates anymore or anyone else that was associated with Epstein and his cohorts. I just assume anyone still working with these people is complicit and needs to be thoroughly investigated.
Wow this is really cool. AAVE and Southern lexes have been underserved linguistically for a long time.
That said, my hunch is your Africa speicifc datasets might lossy, as entire regions of Africa are very linguistically diverse and someone who speaks Bambara and French will affect a different English accent than someone who speaks Maninka and English.
But tangentially related, for non-English languages of the African continent, the Gates Foundation are pledging some grants to improve AI access outside of English-speaking regions: https://news.bpdata.com/article/gates-foundation-pledges-1-b...
Despite being focused on English, your project could be of interest for their funding. It's probably worth reaching out to let them know about your work.
That said, my hunch is your Africa speicifc datasets might lossy, as entire regions of Africa are very linguistically diverse and someone who speaks Bambara and French will affect a different English accent than someone who speaks Maninka and English.