Afro-MNIST: Synthetic generation of MNIST-style datasets for low-resource languages

We present Afro-MNIST, a set of synthetic MNIST-style datasets for four orthographies used in Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo languages: Ge`ez (Ethiopic), Vai, Osmanya, and N'Ko. These datasets serve as ``drop-in'' replacements for MNIST. We hope that MNIST-style datasets will be developed for other numeral systems, and that these datasets vitalize machine learning education in underrepresented nations in the research community.