GSMA and Zindi Launch Landmark African AI Safety Challenge to Shape Global Standards for Trustworthy AI

The GSMA and Zindi today announced the launch of the African Trust & Safety LLM Challenge, a landmark initiative designed to help define the next generation of global AI safety standards.

Unveiled at MWC26 Barcelona, the challenge is part of GSMA’s support for the development of AI in Africa and positions Africa at the forefront of one of the most urgent questions in artificial intelligence: How to ensure powerful language models remain safe, reliable, and aligned across diverse real-world environments.

As generative AI systems scale rapidly into financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, education, and government platforms, safety failures carry increasing societal and economic risk. Yet most existing AI evaluation frameworks are built around a narrow set of dominant global languages and contexts.

With more than 2,000 languages, widespread multilingualism, dialect mixing, and culturally nuanced communication patterns, Africa presents a uniquely rigorous stress test for modern AI. Ensuring AI systems perform safely under these conditions is not only essential for African markets, but has global implications for how AI can be deployed responsibly in emerging and multilingual economies worldwide.

The African Trust & Safety LLM Challenge will run from 4 March to 19 April 2026 on the Zindi platform. It will tap into Zindi’s global community of more than 100,000 data scientists and AI practitioners across 180+ countries to systematically identify vulnerabilities in African-trained and Africa-deployed Large Language Models (LLMs).

Participants will generate structured adversarial prompts and safety classifications to stress-test models across underrepresented languages and code-switched contexts. The outputs will contribute to a reusable, Africa-focused AI trust and safety benchmark — creating practical evaluation tools with relevance far beyond the continent.

This initiative aims to strengthen digital trust, reduce downstream harm, and contribute to the evolving global conversation on AI governance and model accountability.

Celina Lee, CEO and Co-Founder of Zindi, said: “The future of AI will not be defined solely in Silicon Valley or Beijing, it will be defined wherever AI meets linguistic and cultural complexity at scale. Africa represents one of the most demanding real-world environments for modern language models. Through this challenge, we are positioning African AI talent at the center of shaping global standards for trustworthy AI that work across diverse languages, cultures, and contexts.”

Louis Powell, Director of AI Initiatives at GSMA, said: “As AI adoption accelerates across Africa’s mobile ecosystem, safety and reliability are paramount. Through this collaboration with Zindi, we are supporting the development of practical tools and benchmarks that reflect Africa’s linguistic diversity and deployment realities. Strengthening AI trust and safety is essential to unlocking the full potential of AI for inclusive digital growth.”

The competition offers a total prize pool of $5,000 USD and is open to participants across Africa and globally.

Further details and registration information are available at www.zindi.world.

About Zindi

Zindi is the world’s leading AI challenge platform focused on emerging markets, with a community of more than 100,000 data scientists and AI practitioners across over 180 countries. Founded in 2018, Zindi connects organisations with top AI talent to solve real-world business, environmental and social challenges using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Through large-scale competitions and community infrastructure, Zindi is building the talent pipeline and technical foundations for inclusive AI innovation worldwide.

About GSMA

The GSMA is a global organisation unifying the mobile ecosystem to discover, develop and deliver innovation foundational to positive business environments and societal change. Our vision is to unlock the full power of connectivity so that people, industry, and society thrive. Representing mobile operators and organisations across the mobile ecosystem and adjacent industries, the GSMA delivers for its members across three broad pillars: Connectivity for Good, Industry Services and Solutions, and Outreach. This activity includes advancing policy, tackling today’s biggest societal challenges, underpinning the technology and interoperability that make mobile work, and providing the world’s largest platform to convene the mobile ecosystem at the MWC and M360 series of events.

We invite you to find out more at gsma.com