Research & Innovation

We publish what we learn

The ChengetAi Innovation Lab does applied research on the problems African infrastructure actually faces โ€” and we publish our findings and open our tools as the work matures.

Research Agenda

What we're investigating

Digital Scholarship

Repository sustainability

Why institutional repositories thrive or stall across Southern Africa โ€” uptime, discoverability, staffing and funding models โ€” and the operational patterns that keep them alive.

AgriTech

Post-harvest loss as a data problem

How sensor-connected storage, spoilage-risk models and market intelligence change the economics of smallholder harvests.

Language AI

Grounded AI for African languages

Retrieval-augmented generation that answers and cites correctly when the corpus mixes English, Shona and Ndebele โ€” evaluation methods included.

EdTech

AI tutoring & learning gains

Measuring what AI tutors aligned to a heritage-based curriculum actually do for learner outcomes in real classrooms.

Infrastructure

Resilient hosting for low-bandwidth contexts

Deployment patterns that keep institutional systems fast and available where connectivity and power are constraints.

Heritage

Digitising archival collections

OCR and metadata pipelines for African newspapers, manuscripts and records โ€” making national memory searchable.

Open Source

Built on open source, giving back

ChengetAi runs on open source โ€” DSpace, Koha, Moodle, OJS, Docker, Prometheus, Grafana โ€” and we contribute fixes and improvements upstream as we operate these systems in production.

  • Production-hardened deployment recipes for the stacks we run
  • Monitoring dashboards for repository and library health
  • Tooling for Shona and Ndebele language AI

Public releases are being prepared โ€” get in touch to collaborate or get early access.

Work with the Innovation Lab

  • Universities โ€” co-design studies and share findings openly
  • Funders โ€” field-tested pilots with measurable outcomes
  • Engineers โ€” build infrastructure that matters
  • Institutions โ€” become an early-adopter research site

Research with us, build with us

If your institution wants evidence, not promises โ€” let's design the study together.