The current landscape of for-profit companies and education institutions does not support the use or learning of African languages. Manding, for instance, is one of the Continent’s most important trade languages. It’s spoken by 30–40 million people—more than all the people that speak Danish, Swedish and Norwegian combined. And yet, Scandinavians get Siri in their own language and anyone flying into Copenhagen can download Duolingo and know how to greet before their plane hits the ground.

You want to know how to greet people before arriving in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea or Côte d’Ivoire? There’s no Manding language Duolingo and there was no proper English-based mobile dictionary until I made one. Wanna do so for Wolof, Hausa or Fulani—each spoken by tens of millions of people from Senegal all the way to Nigeria? Try again. Tech companies like Google do not support African languages because they do not see a market—West Africans read and write in French and English, they say. Western universities do not put resources into African language offerings because they do not see a market—students aren’t interested, they say.

Both situations create unfortunate feedback loops. Africans don’t see or hear their languages on the internet, so they opt for French or English. Foreigners can’t find quality accessible resources for learning African languages, so they opt for French or English. And Google and Duolingo don’t see anyone wanting to read, write or learn Manding, so they opt for French and English.