Shama

Shama was a humanoid research project led by Prof. Hajar Mousannif at Université Cadi Ayyad in Marrakech, Morocco. The team began work in 2019 and produced the first version after about seven months. UNFPA publicly presented Shama in November 2020 as part of its 16 Days campaign against gender-based violence.

The prototype used a rigid mannequin as its body and an open-source architecture. Creator and press accounts say it could answer questions and read text in Arabic, recognize objects and faces, identify facial emotions and respond to voice commands. One creator page also says it could move in its environment, but no source explains the locomotion mechanism or shows legged walking; the file therefore retains the upper-body classification. Hardware cost about 9,000 Moroccan dirhams according to a 2021 interview, which is a build cost rather than a sale price.

FotaHub committed 1,000,000 dirhams, described as about US$100,000, toward a connected Shama 2.0 research platform. No completed 2.0 model or commercial release was found. Mousannif's current project page dates SHAMA to 2018–2021, so the original project is recorded as discontinued.