As ALCA prepares for its 3rd Annual Conference in Accra this August, we are proud to introduce three volunteers who have joined the team, each bringing a distinct background, a clear purpose, and a shared belief that the African language services industry can thrive. Here is who they are, what brought them here, and what they are working toward.
Shirley-Grace Hart
Strategy, Communications & Moderator , ALCA Webinar Series
Shirley-Grace Hart is a Pan-African entrepreneur, strategist, and the Managing Partner of Foundher, a social enterprise supporting female founders and operators across Africa. She also serves as CMO of Marketing Africa and Editor-in-Chief of OWL Intelligence, a commissioned business intelligence publication. Her ventures sit under Sogba Dynasty, a holding company building platforms across marketing, travel, language, and community.
She is currently an MBA candidate at the Nigerian University of Technology and Management (NUTM) in Lagos, where she also serves as a Research Assistant, working with faculty on case study research across African business contexts.
Her interest in African languages is not peripheral. Shirley-Grace is the founder of Òwá, a Pan-African language learning platform built to make African languages accessible, practical, and commercially viable for the next generation. It is this work that first drew her to ALCA , and convinced her that the industry needed not just practitioners, but builders and advocates willing to close the gap between language as culture and language as infrastructure.
Building Òwá means confronting, daily, the reality that African languages are underrepresented in technology, undervalued in commerce, and underdocumented as an industry. Volunteering with ALCA felt less like a decision and more like a natural next step. She wanted to be close to the people doing the real work , translators, localisers, language technologists, and company owners building something the continent genuinely needs , and to contribute where her skills in strategy, communication, and platform thinking could add value.
Shirley-Grace brings to ALCA a conviction that visibility is infrastructure. An industry that cannot tell its own story cannot attract the investment, talent, or policy attention it deserves. Her goal is to help ALCA sharpen how it communicates the value of this sector , to practitioners, to businesses, to investors, and to the public. She also hopes to build connections between the language services ecosystem and the broader African tech and business community, positioning language not as a support function but as a strategic asset in Africa’s economic future.
Kingsley Amoako
Research, Sponsorship & Outreach , ALCA Annual Conference 2026
Kingsley Amoako is an MCIPS-qualified procurement and supply chain professional with over 14 years of experience in the UN Rome-based agency ecosystem. He holds an MSc in Procurement and Supply Chain Management from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, and a BBA in Business Administration from the University of Rome Tor Vergata.
In his current role as Procurement and Supply Chain Specialist at the Office of the Permanent Representative of Nigeria to the UN Rome-based Agencies, Kingsley manages the full procurement cycle end-to-end, from drafting tender documents and evaluating bids through to contract management and compliance. He has overseen 30+ concurrent vendor contracts and maintained zero audit findings across four consecutive review cycles. Beyond procurement, he brings deep operational experience in high-level international event support, having led supplier research, vendor coordination, and logistics for over 90 international events. He also volunteers with St. Andrew’s Church of Scotland in Rome, coordinating humanitarian logistics for essential goods distribution. He is fluent in English and Italian and is actively advancing his French.
Kingsley spent 14 years inside the United Nations procurement world, supporting agencies whose mandate spans global development and food security. Throughout that time, language was an invisible thread running through everything , translating policies, localising communications, navigating multilingual negotiations. The language industry, he observed, does foundational work that rarely receives the credit it deserves.
When he encountered ALCA and its work building a professional home for African LSPs, something clicked. Africa has over 2,000 languages. The continent’s digital economy is growing fast. And yet the infrastructure supporting African-language technology companies , the tooling, the associations, the institutional frameworks, is still being built. He did not come to this role as a language industry insider. He came as someone who knows what it takes to build something that lasts, and what happens when good coordination is missing from a high-stakes event.
Kingsley’s contribution spans three workstreams: ALCA Research, Sponsorship Drive, and Outreach Tracking. He is building a verified, structured database of 100+ contacts, LSPs, associations, technology buyers, and sponsor prospects mapped across the continent. On sponsorship, he is working a systematic pipeline toward the conference’s revenue targets, with personalised outreach, clear follow-up sequences, and honest tracking. On outreach, his goal is real-time visibility across every sponsor, delegate, and partner relationship the team is managing, no silos, no ambiguity.
His broader ambition for the ALCA Annual Conference to be held from August 27–28, 2026 in Accra is straightforward: a conference that felt properly prepared, where sponsors felt valued, delegates felt welcomed, and the conversations that took place genuinely advanced the African language industry.
Mich-Seth Owusu
Sponsorship & Outreach , ALCA Annual Conference 2026
Mich-Seth Owusu is a dedicated problem solver and innovation leader with an extensive background in implementing knowledge-sharing projects for development programs across Africa. Currently serving as the Community Lead for Ghana Natural Language Processing (Ghana NLP), he manages a community of over 500 NLP enthusiasts and leads capacity-building initiatives to advance local-led solutions to NLP problems.
Most notably, he has championed the accessibility of African linguistic resources by creating and publishing over 1,000 open-access datasets, significantly supporting the broader AI community on the continent. His commitment to indigenous languages is further reflected in his role as the Founder of Kasanoma, an open-source initiative that has developed offline Text-To-Speech models for languages in Ghana, Malawi, and Mozambique.
Mich also brings extensive experience in development and humanitarian cooperation, having worked with organizations such as the African Union and the United Nations World Food Programme.
Driven by a passion to bridge the gap between open-source linguistic technology and the commercial language ecosystem, Mich volunteers with the Association of Language Companies in Africa (ALCA). He is motivated by the desire to elevate African languages in the global digital economy and foster cross-continental collaboration. Through his role with ALCA, he aims to grow his network within the Language Service Provider industry towards championing Africa’s diverse voices within and beyond the continent.