# The Esethu Framework: Reimagining Sustainable Dataset Governance and Curation for Low-Resource Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15916 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15916/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/) (2023)
- [Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05358/) (2016)
- [Open Source MagicData-RAMC: A Rich Annotated Mandarin Conversational(RAMC) Speech Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16844/) (2022)
- [AfriSpeech-200: Pan-African Accented Speech Dataset for Clinical and General Domain ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00274/) (2023)
- [BibleTTS: a large, high-fidelity, multilingual, and uniquely African speech corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03546/) (2022)
- [Speech Robust Bench: A Robustness Benchmark For Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07937/) (2024)
- [Preparing the Vuk'uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African multilingual corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03750/) (2023)
- [Kencorpus: A Kenyan Language Corpus of Swahili, Dholuo and Luhya for Natural Language Processing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12081/) (2022)
- [1000 African Voices: Advancing inclusive multi-speaker multi-accent speech synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11727/) (2024)
- [Semi-supervised Development of ASR Systems for Multilingual Code-switched Speech in Under-resourced Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03135/) (2020)
- [AfroDigits: A Community-Driven Spoken Digit Dataset for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12582/) (2023)
- [Jam-ALT: A Formatting-Aware Lyrics Transcription Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13987/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Swivuriso: The South African Next Voices Multilingual Speech Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02201/) (2025)
- [Position: the Stochastic Parrot in the Coal Mine. Model Collapse is a Threat to Low-Resource Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04127/) (2026)
- [The Annotation Scarcity Paradox in Low-Resource NLP Evaluation: A Decade of Acceleration and Emerging Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19066/) (2026)
- [From Monolingual to Multilingual: Evaluating Mamba for ASR in South African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01502/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents the Esethu Framework, a sustainable data curation framework specifically designed to empower local communities and ensure equitable benefit-sharing from their linguistic resource. This framework is supported by the Esethu license, a novel community-centric data license. As a proof of concept, we introduce the Vuk'uzenzele isiXhosa Speech Dataset (ViXSD), an open-source corpus developed under the Esethu Framework and License. The dataset, containing read speech from native isiXhosa speakers enriched with demographic and linguistic metadata, demonstrates how community-driven licensing and curation principles can bridge resource gaps in automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages while safeguarding the interests of data creators. We describe the framework guiding dataset development, outline the Esethu license provisions, present the methodology for ViXSD, and present ASR experiments validating ViXSD's usability in building and refining voice-driven applications for isiXhosa.