Meta Announces Recipients of Inaugural Llama Impact Grants and Innovation Awards Across Africa, Middle East and Turkey

Meta Announces Recipients of Inaugural Llama Impact Grants and Innovation Awards Across Africa, Middle East and Turkey

September 24, 2024 – Today, Meta announced the recipients of the 2023 Llama Impact Grants and the Llama Impact Innovation Awards. Launched in October 2023, the programme is designed to support innovative use cases of Llama 2 and Llama 3 that address pressing social issues. With over 800 submissions from organisations in more than 90 countries, the program highlights innovative solutions leveraging Llama models to address major challenges in education and the environment, as well as technological innovation.

Llama Impact Grants

As one of the Llama Impact Grants winners, Digital Green, in partnership with One Acre Fund, will receive $500,000 USD. The runner-up, Jacaranda Health, will receive $300,000 USD to support their project. The projects include:

Advising Farmers in Underserved Areas: Digital Green’s Farmer Chat project aims to develop a multilingual AI chatbot that provides customised, on-demand agricultural advisory services to small-scale farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. Llama will be fine-tuned on a vast repository of agricultural data to adapt the model to the specific needs and contexts of different regions. Llama’s conversational capabilities will then be used to provide comprehensive and practical responses in a variety of languages including Hindi, Swahili, and Kikuyu.

Runners Up and Impact Innovation Awardees: Jacaranda Health aims to expand its digital health tool, PROMPTS, which uses SMS behavioral nudges and an AI-enabled clinical helpdesk to empower new and expecting mothers across Kenya, Ghana, and Eswatini to seek and connect with the right care at the right time. The goal is to make PROMPTS the go-to resource for personalised maternal and newborn health support across Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Llama Impact Innovation Awards

In addition to the Llama Impact Grants, Meta also announced the recipients of the Llama Impact Innovation Awards. Award winners will receive up to $35,000 USD, including mentorship, partnership opportunities and ad credits, to further their innovative work with Llama. The award recipients include:

HelpMum, which has developed an innovative chatbot service that delivers accurate and timely information on vaccination and immunisation. Leveraging Llama 3’s advanced language processing capabilities, HelpMum created Vax-Llamamodel—an AI-driven, open-source model designed to provide reliable vaccination information. This open-source model can be integrated into HelpMum’s chatbot service and adopted/used by healthcare organisations worldwide.

Tanzania AI Community’s chatbot Twiga which provides teachers with a virtual assistant for generating exams, lesson notes and course materials tailored to the Tanzanian curriculum via WhatsApp. Twiga uses Llama 3 to generate contextualised educational content to address the shortage of quality resources and the high workload of teachers in Tanzania. It uses Llama 3 70B in its RAG pipeline to generate high-quality educational exercises and Llama 3 7B for smaller tasks like efficient query pre-processing and data extraction.

Flow Informatics’ phosoAI project aims to address food insecurity in Malawi by enhancing a WhatsApp-based chatbot that provides people with real-time information on food prices, availability, and agricultural practices, particularly in rural and urban areas. The chatbot uses Llama 3 to provide real-time information to users in Chichewa. It also allows for voice commands to improve accessibility in low-literacy areas.

Meta is deeply committed to open-source AI and believes that expanding access will drive meaningful global progress. Applications for the Llama 3.1 Impact Grants are now open until November 22, 2024.

   

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Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology.