About
The Enzi Prize is run by an independent Delaware non-profit corporation built for one purpose: to define a public benchmark for affordable AI inference in African languages and contexts, and to pay out on verified results.
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The Enzi Prize is a programme of the Enzi Prize Foundation, a non-profit corporation incorporated in the State of Delaware, United States. It exists as an independent entity.
A prize is only worth what its neutrality is worth. The benchmark has to be credible to a team in Nairobi, a research lab in Lagos, a hyperscaler in Seattle, and a ministry in Abuja at the same time. Independence is not a legal formality here. It is the product.
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The prize is stood up as its own corporation with its own entity, its own committee, and its own governance.
The board holds the only binding authority. Grants, prize awards, budget, and strategy are decided by the board of the Enzi Prize Foundation. No other body in this structure can commit the Foundation to anything.
Donors. Sponsors, grantmakers, fund the Foundation. To create flexibility, donors can fund smaller prizes and initiatives related to the inference goal, for example other sovereign AI objectives, government tech, talent development and community outcomes, as long as they materially support the main objective. Funding flows to the board and the board directs it according to donor agreements. No funder directs an award, and no contribution carries a decision outside a specific donor agreement approved by the board.
Advisory councils advise. Donors and domain experts sit on advisory councils. Their input is non-binding by design. They hold no vote and they do not disburse funds. This is written into the structure rather than left to good behaviour, because the moment a funder can steer an award the benchmark stops being worth anything.
Judges recuse. Any judge who intends to invest in, hire, or otherwise back a competing team recuses from evaluating that team. This is a written condition of serving, not a courtesy.
Results are open. Winning solutions must be open source, reproducible, and royalty-free for use in Africa. Winners keep their commercial upside. Nobody, including us, gets to rent the result back to the continent at a markup.
No single-region capture. The prize is pan-African. Editions stay open. No partner, region, or portfolio gets a privileged path to the purse.
Founding Partner seats carry governance participation and are capped at four. What that participation includes, and what it explicitly does not, is set out in the partner agreement rather than negotiated case by case.
The board and committee roster will be published ahead of the prize launch in October.
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The Enzi Prize began as a project of the Nduzi Foundation. Nduzi convened the founding coalition, funded the early work, and holds a governance role in the Foundation today.
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Founding Partner conversations are underway. Seats are capped at four.
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General and partnerships: hello@enziprize.org
Press: hello@enziprize.org
Enzi Prize Foundation, 8 The Green, Suite A, Dover, DE 19901.