shega-insight/dfs-glossary

DFS Glossary — Amharic & Afaan Oromoo

Expert-verified glossaries of Digital Financial Services (DFS) terminology in Amharic (am) and Afaan Oromoo (om), published as structured, machine-readable, openly-licensed data.

Open language infrastructure for two low-resource Ethiopian languages — for developers, researchers, translators, and the financial-inclusion community.

Languages	Amharic (am, Ge'ez script) · Afaan Oromoo (om, Latin script)
Entries	87 Amharic + 86 Afaan Oromoo = 173
License	CC BY 4.0
Version	1.0

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

am = load_dataset("shega/dfs-glossary", "am")   # Amharic glossary
om = load_dataset("shega/dfs-glossary", "om")   # Afaan Oromoo glossary

print(am["train"][0]["term_local"])  # should print clean Ge'ez, e.g. የአገልግሎት ነጥብ

Data fields

Field	Type	Description
id	string	Stable, language-prefixed id (am-001, om-001). Never reused.
term_en	string	English term — the join key across languages.
term_local	string	Term in the target language (Ge'ez / Latin).
language	string	am or om.
category	string | null	Domain grouping (e.g. Channel, Concept, Process). Verbatim from source.
definition_local	string	Verified definition in the target language.
definition_en	string | null	English definition, where available.
example_local	string | null	Usage example in the target language.
example_en	string | null	English usage example, where available.
version	string	Dataset version (1.0).

The English term (term_en) is shared across the two languages, so the am and om configs can be joined on it.

Methodology

Translated and verified by domain experts as part of the AKOFADA project, and built under a strict fidelity policy:

• Source is the editable copy decks, never the PDFs. Ge'ez (Amharic) script corrupts when copied out of PDFs; for a terminology dataset a single wrong character destroys trust. PDFs are used only for human spot-checks.
• Text is preserved verbatim — only whitespace tidying is applied. No spelling, wording, casing, or Unicode normalisation of the verified text.
• The two languages are cross-linked on the English term.

Provenance

• Producer: Shega
• Project: AKOFADA
• Funding: Gates Foundation

Citation

@dataset{shega_dfs_glossary_2026,
  title  = {DFS Glossary — Amharic & Afaan Oromoo},
  author = {Shega and AKOFADA},
  year   = {2026},
  version = {1.0},
  publisher = {Shega},
  note   = {DOI pending — to be added on first release},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/shega/dfs-glossary}
}

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Free to share and adapt, including commercially, with attribution.