NLP & AI Intern Intern NGO Job ACHGJ

NGO Job. Africa Centre for Health Systems and Gender Justice Jobs

Location: Nairobi, with possible community engagement in informal settlements and partner sites
Duration: 3 to 6 months
Type: Internship
Reports to: FemDigiNomics Project Lead

About the Africa Centre for Health Systems and Gender Justice

The Africa Centre for Health Systems and Gender Justice is a Pan-African social impact organisation advancing gender justice in health systems through inclusive financing, community-led care, and feminist leadership. Our mission is to reimagine economic systems as catalysts for health equity. Our vision is an Africa where women, girls, and structurally marginalised communities build economic power, leadership, and voice to shape equitable and just health systems.

FemDigiNomics is a women-centred data and intelligence platform being developed by the Africa Centre for Health Systems and Gender Justice. Building on HerEconomics, the platform seeks to use community-generated data, Swahili natural language processing (NLP), responsible AI, and participatory research to strengthen women’s financial inclusion, livelihood resilience, and health-informed economic empowerment. FemDigiNomics aims to translate women’s lived experiences of savings, debt, enterprise growth, care responsibilities, health-related financial pressures, and digital access into practical tools, including a Women’s Financial Inclusion and Lending Readiness Scorecard, community insights, and decision-support systems that improve economic opportunities and wellbeing for low-income women.

The NLP and AI Intern will support the development of English and Swahili language resources and early AI/NLP workflows for FemDigiNomics.

Key responsibilities

• Support the collection, cleaning, translation, and annotation of Swahili and mixed-language narratives.
• Help develop language categories around savings, debt, chama obligations, business risk,
• care work, health shocks, and lending readiness.
• Assist in testing simple NLP workflows for classifying women’s needs, barriers, and support pathways.
• Support documentation of language resources, annotation protocols, and model/testing
• outputs.
• Contribute to responsible AI discussions, including bias, explainability, privacy, and ethical use of women’s data.
• Work with community and research teams to ensure language tools reflect how women actually describe their economic realities.

Ideal candidate

• Background in computer science, data science, computational linguistics, AI, NLP, information systems, or related fields.
• Interest in African languages, especially Swahili and Sheng.
• Basic knowledge of Python, NLP libraries, machine learning, data annotation, or language data processing is an advantage.
• Strong commitment to ethical, community-grounded AI.

Cross-Cutting Requirements for All Interns

All applicants should demonstrate:

• Strong interest in women’s economic opportunity, gender justice, financial inclusion, and health equity.
• Respect for community knowledge, lived experience, and ethical data practices.
• Ability to work with low-income women and grassroots partners with dignity and sensitivity.
• Good writing, documentation, and communication skills.
• Fluency in English and Swahili.
• Ability to work independently and as part of a multidisciplinary team.
• Willingness to learn and work across research, programme implementation, technology, and community engagement.

What Interns Will Gain

• Interns will gain practical experience in:
• Community-rooted AI and NLP for African languages.
• Women’s financial inclusion and lending readiness.
• Participatory research and data collection.
• Responsible AI, data governance, and ethical use of community data.
• Programme implementation with grassroots women’s organisations.
• Translating research and data into practical tools for low-income women.
• Working at the intersection of gender justice, economic opportunity, health, and technology.

How to Apply

Interested applicants should submit:

• A short cover letter indicating the internship role they are applying for.
• A current CV.
• A short writing sample, data sample, coding sample, or portfolio, where relevant.
• Availability and preferred internship duration.

Applications should be sent to: vacancies@healthsystemsgenderjustice.org cc info@healthsystemsgenderjustice.org

Subject line: FemDigiNomics Internship Application – [Role Applied For]

Deadline: 15th August 2026