How AFIIA Scaled Multilingual Inclusion Across Africa’s Internal Audit Community

Organization Snapshot: African Federation of Institutes of Internal Auditors (AFIIA)

Founded in 2009, AFIIA unites IIA member institutes across Africa to strengthen the internal audit profession through collaboration, professional development, and knowledge exchange.‍

Industry: Professional Association / Non-Profit
Event Types: Conferences, webinars, and member communications
Primary Languages: English, French, Portuguese
Scale: 1,200+ professionals at flagship conferences

Challenge: Turning Linguistic Diversity into Participation, Engagement, and Growth

Africa’s professional communities span dozens of countries and languages, yet most conferences still default to one or two dominant languages. For AFIIA, representing Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone members, this created a growing risk of unequal access to knowledge and reduced engagement as the organization expanded.

At its premier AFIIA Conference, reliance on in-person interpreters added cost and complexity while limiting scalability across multi-day, multi-track programming.

“Bringing together professionals from Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone countries at a single conference is powerful, but without the right translation approach, not everyone was able to fully engage,” said Kafaso Millinga, AFIIA Head of Secretariat.

Solution: Real-Time AI Translation with Wordly

AFIIA adopted Wordly in May 2021 at its annual conference in Arusha, Tanzania to support real-time, multilingual participation without interpreter booths, headsets, or changes to event flow.

How AFIIA Uses Wordly

• Bi-monthly webinars (~200 participants per session)
• Annual conferences serving hundreds of multilingual attendees
• Real-time AI translation across English, French, and Portuguese

What Wordly Enables

• Equal participation across languages
• Scalable access for virtual and in-person events
• Simple setup with no specialized equipment

“Wordly allows all members to follow live sessions in their preferred language instantly,” continued Millinga.

Results: Inclusion Delivered and Engagement Strengthened

Wordly enables AFIIA to scale multilingual access across high-attendance, high-stakes events to support growth without added operational burden. The live translation platform helped AFIIA turn linguistic diversity into a strategic advantage:

• Inclusivity delivered: Language-related complaints eliminated‍
• Stronger engagement: Increased meeting frequency and member communication‍
• Positive feedback: Attendees consistently praise ease of multilingual access‍
• Greater efficiency: Reduced reliance on interpreter scheduling

“Since using Wordly, participation has improved and feedback from members has been overwhelmingly positive,” continued Millinga. “The platform allows us to support multilingual participation at scale, without changing how we run our events.”

Looking Ahead: Ongoing Innovation and Insights with Wordly

Wordly is central to AFIIA’s event and communications strategy, providing multilingual access across both virtual and in-person programs. AFIIA continues to rely on Wordly for conference translation and webinar translation and values ongoing platform enhancements, including expanded activity and usage reporting by event, monthly, quarterly, and annually.

“The upgraded reporting supports AFIIA’s internal planning, new initiatives, and license renewal decisions as we continue to grow,” concluded Millinga.

About AFIIA

AFIIA is the federation of institutes of internal auditors in Africa that was formed for the purpose of promoting internal audit profession and representing interests of its members in global fora.

AFIIA was founded in 2009 by leaders of 11 recognized African IIA Institutes in Johannesburg, SA, and witnessed by representatives from The IIA Global, IFACI, the World Bank, ECIIA, and AFROSAI. During the founding meeting, AFIIA’s Constitution and Logo were adopted, and the first GC was elected. AFIIAs’ founding institutes were IIA South Africa, IIA Botswana, IIA Democratic Republic of Congo, IIA Mauritius, IIA Ethiopia, IIA Ghana, IIA Kenya, IIA Malawi, IIA Tanzania, IIA Tunisia, and IIA Uganda.

About Wordly

Wordly helps make every meeting, event, and conference instantly accessible across languages. Its AI-powered platform provides accurate translation and captioning in dozens of languages, along with transcripts and summaries, streamlining communication at any scale. Attendees can join via a simple QR code or link, with no downloads or extra equipment required, ensuring seamless participation for virtual, hybrid, or in-person events.

Enterprise-ready, secure, and compliant, Wordly supports everything from small team meetings to large international conferences. It allows everyone to follow along, contribute, and engage without the expense and logistics of human interpreters.

See it in action – book a personalized demo.