How AI Broke Language Barriers at the Global Gathering of Pastoralist Women: Real-Time Translation with Omnio

Pastoralist communities across the world share more in common with one another than most professions do. A herder managing grazing land in the Andes and a herder managing grazing land in the Himalayas face the same seasonal pressures, the same land constraints, and the same dependence on livestock for survival. Their knowledge of that work, built over generations, is remarkably similar. What separates them is not experience but language and in gatherings meant to bring that shared knowledge together, language has historically been the barrier that decides who gets heard and who gets left out of the conversation. 

This was the challenge at the center of the Global Gathering of Pastoralist Women, organized by ICIMOD in Kathmandu from March 26 to 29, 2026. The gathering brought together over 90 pastoralist and agro-pastoralist women from 40 countries and regions to exchange knowledge on grazing management, resource access, and the preservation of a livelihood that receives little institutional attention despite its scale. An exchange of that kind depends entirely on real-time communication. Delayed or manual translation would have flattened the discussion into a series of disconnected statements rather than a genuine dialogue. For the gathering to serve its purpose, participants needed to understand and respond to one another as the conversation was happening, not after the fact.

acAIberry was engaged as the official AI translation partner for the gathering, and deployed OMNIO, a real-time multilingual interpretation platform. OMNIO was built to interpret spoken language across multiple languages simultaneously and deliver the interpretation to listeners in real-time. The platform was developed specifically to address a recurring gap in international and multilingual events that routinely bring together participants who do not share a common language, yet the burden of overcoming that barrier is typically placed on the attendees themselves, through human interpreters who are costly to scale, or informal translation that slows discussion and loses nuance. By automating real-time interpretation, it allows organizers to include speakers of any language in a single conversation without requiring participants to compromise on how fully they can express themselves or understand others.

The true measure of OMNIO’s impact wasn't found in our technical logs, but in the voices of the people using it on the floor. Here is what some of them said:

“When we first envisioned bringing women from grasslands across the world to Kathmandu, we knew language barriers would be a massive hurdle. OMNIO solved that completely—it is an essential tool for any international gathering.”
— María Fernández-Giménez, Co-Chair, IYRP Working Group on Pastoralism & Gender

“OMNIO enabled these women to communicate seamlessly, share lived experiences, and formulate strategies to protect their collective future. It's an incredible app—I wish I could use it daily to connect with my colleagues.”
— Klara (Netherlands), ICIMOD Event Facilitator

“Hearing the entire conference translated into my native language allowed me to fully understand the policies and connect with other participants. Even though we didn't share a spoken language, OMNIO gave us a way to truly understand each other.”
— Adama Lam Ka (Senegal), Participant

The ICIMOD gathering is one example of a broader need that OMNIO was built to serve. It made clear that the value of this kind of technology extends beyond the mechanics of translation. Removing the language barrier did not just make conversation possible; it allowed participants to reach a level of understanding, and to build a level of connection that would not have been possible otherwise. That is the broader premise behind OMNIO, enabling people to communicate not only across languages, but toward the shared understanding, collaboration, and connection that language barriers have historically made difficult to reach.