Burkina Faso is a multi-cultural and diverse country with a rich history. This article explores how personal names can be interpreted to reflect regional and ethnic appartenance within the country. Then we illustrate how using a personal name can affect a black-box Artificial Intelligence – such as OpenAI’s DALL-E. This is the first article in our series of blog posts with the tag #thisnamedpersondoesnotexist.
Why is this important? A common misconception of biases in machine learning, especially in Europe, is to consider that obfuscating sensitive data (such as gender, race, or ethnicity) will ensure computers will be gender-neutral and colour-blind. In practice, machine learning -especially neural networks applied to natural language processing- can ‘learn’ those variables even when they are not explicitly part of the input. Let’s take the example of resume screening software: the algorithm can learn the gender variable (or a correlated proxy variable) from grammatical rules. AI is such an effective and powerful help in decision-making that most US companies and recruiters rely on AI-powered application tracking systems (ATS). It is estimated that 75% of resumes in the US are read by computers, before reaching the human eye. So even if your resume doesn’t specify your gender or any other sensitive information, such as race or ethnicity, it might affect the way the computer ranks your job application. It takes very proactive effort by companies or ATS software vendors to tackle the issue of bias in AI, but there are solutions (NamSor+Aequitas [PDF], FixOut, etc.)
Here are some common male and female names and surnames in Burkina Faso,
| Top female given names | Top male given names |
| MARIAM | ADAMA |
| FATIMATA | BOUREIMA |
| AMINATA | MOUSSA |
| RASMATA | AMADOU |
| HAOUA | HAMIDOU |
| SALAMATA | ABDOULAYE |
| AWA | OUSMANE |
| MINATA | SOULEYMANE |
| AZETA | SAIDOU |
| RAMATA | HAMA |
| BIBATA | OUMAROU |
| HABIBOU | ISSA |
| FATOUMATA | IDRISSA |
| ALIMATA | YACOUBA |
| FATI | RASMANE |
| FADIMA | HAMADOU |
| AISSATOU | MAMOUDOU |
| SALMATA | ISSAKA |
| SALIMATA | LASSANE |
| MAMOUNATA | HAROUNA |
And here are some common surnames,
| Top family name |
| OUEDRAOGO |
| SAWADOGO |
| SAVADOGO |
| DICKO |
| DIALLO |
| OUATTARA |
| TRAORE |
| KABORE |
| TAMBOURA |
| BELEM |
| KONATE |
| LANKOANDE |
| BARRY |
| MAIGA |
| COMPAORE |
| SIDIBE |
| SANOU |
| ZONGO |
| SANKARA |
| TINDANO |
But the prevalence of names varies according to the regions and ethnic groups (Mossi, Fulani, Gurma, Bobo, Gurunsi, Senufo, Bissa, Lobi, Dagara, Tuareg, Ikelan, Dioula …)
This named person does not exist
Since the web site thispersondoesnotexist hit the news, most people have heard of (or experienced) GANs (generative adversarial network). This particular website generates random faces of people who do not exist in real life: faces are constructed from millions of pictures of male and female people of different age, race, or ethnic backgrounds.
Recently, we’ve seen the emergence of text-to-image AI such as DALL-E, StableDiffusion, Mid journey. In the case of DALL-E, we know that the developpers behind the software tried to mitigate gender and racial bias in the software by randomly appending “female” and “black” to the text input. With this trick, the image generated from the prompt “Portrait of a CEO of a large company” will likely generate images with gender and ethnic diversity. Here is an example:
How likely is the lady on the right to be from Burkina Faso ?
DALL-E has a safety feature to avoid generating explicit images or images of famous people. But you can generate images from personal names that are very common. And, of course, it is very likely to correctly infer gender, race, and ethnicity based on the prompt – because that’s part of the software’s training set.
This Aminata OUEDRAOGO does not exist
We’ve looked at some common names shared by many people in the Nord/Centre-Nord of Burkina Faso and prompted DALL-E to generate portraits. Here are some names,
| Common female name | Common male name |
| AMINATA OUEDRAOGO | ABDOULAYE OUEDRAOGO |
| FATIMATA OUEDRAOGO | ADAMA OUEDRAOGO |
| AZETA SAVADOGO | BOUREIMA SAWADOGO |
| MARIAM SAVADOGO | HAMADO SAWADOGO |
Here are some of the female portraits generated by DALL-E:
This Abdoulaye OUEDRAOGO does not exist
Here are some of the male portraits generated by DALL-E:w
See also those four portraits,
Common Burkina Faso names in Sahel region
Here are some common names in Sahel shared by many people,
| Common female names | Common male names |
| AISSATOU DICKO | AMADOU DIALLO |
| FADIMA DICKO | ABDOULAYE DICKO |
| FATOUMATA TAMBOURA | MOUSSA DICKO |
| MAIRAMA TAMBOURA | AMADOU TAMBOURA |
Common Burkina Faso names in Plateau Central region
Here are some common names in Plateau Central shared by many people,
| Common female names | Common male names |
| MARIAM KABORE | ADAMA KABORE |
| SALAMATA KABORE | HAMADO KABORE |
| AWA OUEDRAOGO | ISSAKA OUEDRAOGO |
| MAMOUNATA OUEDRAOGO | RASMANE OUEDRAOGO |
Common Burkina Faso names in Hauts-Bassins region
Here are some common names in Hauts-Bassins shared by many people,
| Common female names | Common male names |
| MARIAM OUATTARA | ABDOULAYE TRAORE |
| AWA TRAORE | DRISSA TRAORE |
| FATOUMATA TRAORE | LASSINA TRAORE |
| MINATA TRAORE | YACOUBA TRAORE |
Common Burkina Faso names in Cascades region
Here are some common names in Cascades shared by many people,
| Common female names | Common male names |
| AWA OUATTARA | ADAMA OUATTARA |
| DJENEBA OUATTARA | DAOUDA OUATTARA |
| FATOUMATA OUATTARA | MAMADOU OUATTARA |
| KOROTOUMOU OUATTARA | SEYDOU OUATTARA |
Common Burkina Faso names in Boucle du Mouhoun region
Here are some common names in Boucle du Mouhoun region shared by many people,
| Common female names | Common male names |
| FATOUMATA KONATE | ADAMA KONATE |
| MARIAM KONATE | DRISSA KONATE |
| AZETA OUEDRAOGO | SIAKA KONATE |
| RAMATA OUEDRAOGO | MOUSSA SIDIBE |
Common Burkina Faso names in Est region
Here are some common names in Est region shared by many people,
| Common female names | Common male names |
| FADIMA DIALLO | AMADOU BARRY |
| MARIAM LANKOANDE | HAMADOU DIALLO |
| LARBA LANKOANDE | ARDJIMA LANKOANDE |
| DJINGRI TINDANO | DJINGRI LANKOANDE |
Common Burkina Faso names in Centre-Ouest region
Here are some common names in Centre-Ouest region shared by many people,
| Common female names | Common male names |
| AWA KABORE | ADAMA KABORE |
| RASMATA KABORE | SIBIRI KABORE |
| RASMATA OUEDRAOGO | SAIDOU OUEDRAOGO |
| RASMATA ZONGO | ADAMA ZONGO |
Common Burkina Faso names in Centre / Centre-Sud region
Here are some common names in Centre / Centre-Sud region shared by many people,
| Common female names | Common male names |
| MARIAM COMPAORE | ADAMA COMPAORE |
| RASMATA NIKIEMA | ADAMA OUEDRAOGO |
| BIBATA OUEDRAOGO | BOUKARE OUEDRAOGO |
| MARIAM NIKIEMA | BOUREIMA OUEDRAOGO |
Common Burkina Faso names in Centre-Sud region
Here are some common names in Centre-Sud region shared by many people,
| Common female names | Common male names |
| MARIAM COMPAORE | ADAMA COMPAORE |
| RASMATA NIKIEMA | ADAMA OUEDRAOGO |
| BIBATA OUEDRAOGO | BOUKARE OUEDRAOGO |
| MARIAM NIKIEMA | BOUREIMA OUEDRAOGO |
Common Burkina Faso names in Sud-Ouest region
Here are some common names in Sud-Ouest region shared by many people,
| Common female names | Common male names |
| OHO DA | SANSAN DA |
| YERI HIEN | SIE DA |
| YELLI KAM | SIE HIEN |
| INI KAMBOU | OLLO KAMBOU |
Common Burkina Faso names in Sud-Ouest region
Here are some common names in Sud-Ouest region shared by many people,
| Common female names | Common male names |
| OHO DA | SANSAN DA |
| YERI HIEN | SIE DA |
| YELLI KAM | SIE HIEN |
| INI KAMBOU | OLLO KAMBOU |
We’ll amend this post with links to newly generated images with tag #thisnamedpersondoesnotexist, using the various text-to-image AIs. Keep updated! Also, subscribe to our Twitter account or connect on LinkedIn to hear more about our project to automatically redress gender and racial biases in AI (in collaboration with FIXOUT team).
This blog post used Dall-E for illustration based on the text “A crowd in Burkina Faso“. Here is a french version.
About NamSor
NamSor™ Applied Onomastics is a European vendor of sociolinguistics software (NamSor sorts names). NamSor mission is to help understand international flows of money, ideas and people. We proudly support Gender Gap Grader.