Cleared African archive — radio, broadcast, film
Decades of in-language radio, broadcast and film sitting in archives that were never contracted for machine learning, in a market with no aggregator working it.
Radio back-catalogues and call-in programming from anglophone and francophone stations, podcast networks, ministry and public-service recordings, Nollywood production archives, and the event and commercial videographers who hold thirty years of a country's ordinary life on tape. The material exists, it is enormous, and almost none of it has ever been licensed to anybody.
The reason it has not been aggregated is not that rights holders are unwilling. It is that clearing it takes someone in the room who can read a Nigerian or Cameroonian production agreement, reconstruct chain of title per asset, and put an instrument in front of a station manager that names AI training in a way a laboratory's counsel will accept. That work is the product; the tape is the raw material.
We take it on in tranches and only where chain of title can be reconstructed and warranted per asset — because an aggregator who buys from us is going to sublicense onward, and a tranche that cannot be warranted is a liability travelling downstream with their name on it rather than ours. Where the rights are reconstructable, the material is genuinely without substitute: languages, registers and settings that appear nowhere else in licensed form.
Specification
- Sources
- Radio back-catalogues, call-in and talk programming, podcast networks, ministry recordings, film production archives, commercial videographers
- Territories
- Nigeria, Cameroon, and the francophone Central African corridor
- Gate
- Per-asset chain of title reconstructable and warrantable before a tranche is accepted
- Rights
- AI training named in the grant, sublicensable onward through multiple tiers
- Excluded
- Third-party music, licensed insert footage, unreleased performers
- Approach
- Rights audit first, delivery second — tranche by tranche, each cleared independently
Other supply lines
In-language conversational audio
Unscripted, multi-speaker, overlapping speech in languages with effectively no licensed commercial corpus — from cleared archive and from purpose-built collection.
Egocentric & real-world capture
Purpose-collected, head- and chest-mounted first-person video from working environments that cannot be collected anywhere else.
Instrumented & sensor-layered capture
The premium tier of embodied data — multi-rig, force-instrumented capture of manual work, stood up against a funded brief.
Enterprise & operational documents
Company archives, contracts, correspondence, forms, technical manuals and printed matter — the document layer that extraction and document-understanding models are starved of outside Europe and North America.
Property & transaction records
Listings, valuations, title histories and completed-deal records from agencies, developers and estate surveyors — the structured layer under African urban property, which no dataset currently describes.
De-identified institutional & financial records
Transaction, statement and ledger records supplied by the institution that holds them, de-identified before they leave the building, and licensed for model training under a data-sharing agreement.