Epistemic Exclusion of the Hausa Language in AI Safety by Hadiya Usman

I. I was sit­ting with a pam­phlet in front of me, an AI safety aware­ness flyer we were prepar­ing for a pro­ject called Safer Schools, Safer Com­mu­ni­ties, de­signed to be printed and dis­played as posters in schools and com­mu­nity spaces across north­ern Nige­ria. My job was to trans­late it into Hausa so that the stu­dents, teach­ers, and com­mu­nity mem­bers who walked past it ev­ery day could ac­tu­ally read it and un­der­stand it.I got stuck al­most im­me­di­ately.Not be­cause the Hausa...