Kìkì ògo

Kìkì ògo didn't start as a business plan — it started as a bug.

While building the Green Time Ecology & Sustainable Development Initiative's IDWIP Tree-Planting Tracker, an Indigenous Voice Archive feature was designed to transcribe elders' oral histories in Hausa, Yorùbá, Igbo, and other languages, using Google's own Gemini. Every single attempt failed — six for six, across five days. The reason: Gemini simply isn't served from anywhere on the African continent, and never has been.

Rather than quietly routing Elder recordings through servers abroad to make the feature work, we asked a different question: what if we built this ourselves? Kìkì ògo is that answer — self-hosted transcription infrastructure for African languages, paired with best-in-class translation — currently powered by Google Cloud, with a roadmap toward fully self-hosted translation as open models improve.

The long-term vision is bigger than translation. Kìkì ògo is meant to become Africa's language intelligence layer — powering education, business, government services, and everyday communication in the languages people actually speak at home.