UNICEF WCARO NLP Landscape

West and Central Africa Language Technology
Last updated: 2026-04-23
Work in progress. Some data may contain inaccuracies. Contribute on GitHub

Igbo

ibo / ig

🌍 General Information

ibo
ig
igbo
nucl1417
Niger–Congo
Latin ( Ọnwụ alphabet ) Nwagu Aneke script Neo- Nsibidi Ndebe script Igbo Braille Akagụ Script
34 million
27000000 (10⁶+)
safe
Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria
Ebo, Ibo, Unege

🗺️ Language Use

Data from CLEAR Global's Language Use Data Platform.

👥 Actors (11)

Awarri (Startup)

Nigerian AI startup ("awari" = "to seek and find" in Yoruba) that built N-ATLAS -- Nigeria's first government-backed open-source multilingual AI model...

Data Science Nigeria (Non-Profit / Community)

Data Science Nigeria (DSN) is Africa's foremost AI and Data Science organization, dedicated to raising 1 million AI talents across the continent. As A...

Farmerline / Darli AI (Startup)

Ghanaian agritech company building technology solutions for smallholder farmers. Core platform Mergdata is a cloud-based farm management system used b...

HausaNLP (Research Community)

Open community of academics, researchers, linguists, students, and NLP enthusiasts dedicated to advancing Hausa NLP. Based at the Department of Comput...

Intron Voice AI (Startup)

Africa-focused voice AI startup (formerly Intron Health, rebranded mid-2025 as they expanded beyond healthcare). Builds the "infrastructure layer for ...

Lyngual Labs (Startup)

Nigerian AI research lab building speech and NLP models for Nigerian languages, with a focus on Yoruba. Operates under LynguaTech Innovative Foundatio...

Masakhane (Research Community And Foundation)

Masakhane ("We build together" in isiZulu) is a grassroots NLP organization dedicated to strengthening natural language processing research in African...

ML Collective (Ngo)

Non-profit research lab providing research opportunities to independent and underrepresented researchers. Runs multiple African language NLP projects ...

NaijaVoices (Community Initiative)

Community-driven initiative building Africa's largest speech datasets for Nigerian languages. The NaijaVoices dataset contains 1,800+ hours of speech ...

National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR) (Government)

NCAIR is a special purpose vehicle of NITDA (National Information Technology Development Agency) created to promote research and development on emergi...

UBC Deep Learning & NLP Lab (University)

Research lab at the University of British Columbia led by Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, focused on deep representation learning and natural language socio-pr...

🤖 NLP & Tech Resources

✓ AfroLID
✓ Google Translate: 2013
✓ NLLB-200
✓ M2M-100
✓ Mozilla Common Voice
✓ MADLAD-400 Docs: 54400 MAD-Docs
✓ MADLAD-400 Sentences: 1400000 MAD-Sents
✓ Aya-101
✓ Fineweb2: 💬
✓ FLEURS
✓ AfriHate
✓ NaijaVoices
✓ MMS-ASR
✓ MMS-LID
✓ Omnilingual ASR
✓ SimbaBench
✓ WaxalNLP

🎙️ Common Voice

13.2
8702
269
♂ 9.0% / ♀ 44.0%

Benchmarks

ASR (Speech-to-Text)

FLEURS-102 test

ModelCERSource
facebook/mms-1b-fl10211.1reported

FLEURS-102 dev

ModelCERSource
facebook/mms-1b-fl10210.7reported

PazaBench (aggregated)

ModelCERWERSource
facebook/omniASR-LLM-7B13.039.0reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-7B-ZS14.045.0reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-1B17.051.0reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-3B16.048.0reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-300M16.049.0reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-7B20.063.0reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-1B20.063.0reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-3B23.070.0reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-300M21.067.0reported
microsoft/paza-mms-1b-all14.049.0reported
facebook/mms-1b-all16.053.0reported
facebook/mms-1b-fl10216.050.0reported
microsoft/paza-Phi-4-multimodal-instruct44.095.0reported
nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v348.097.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-conformer-rel-pos-large-960h-ft52.0105.0reported
facebook/data2vec-audio-large-960h55.0103.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-conformer-rope-large-960h-ft56.0104.0reported
facebook/hubert-large-ls960-ft51.0101.0reported
facebook/hubert-xlarge-ls960-ft50.0101.0reported
microsoft/paza-whisper-large-v3-turbo58.094.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-large-960h-lv60-self55.0100.0reported
facebook/data2vec-audio-base-960h58.0108.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-large-robust-ft-libri-960h54.0104.0reported
nvidia/canary-qwen-2.5b60.0109.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-large-960h67.0103.0reported
ibm/granite-speech-3.3-2b62.0106.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-base-960h78.0102.0reported
openai/whisper-large-v3-turbo61.095.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-turbo-acc62.096.0reported
distil-whisper/distil-large-v365.098.0reported
ibm/granite-speech-3.3-8b67.0112.0reported
openai/whisper-large62.096.0reported
distil-whisper/distil-medium.en75.099.0reported
openai/whisper-large-v371.098.0reported
distil-whisper/distil-large-v275.099.0reported
Qwen/Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct72.0105.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-acc73.098.0reported
openai/whisper-large-v269.098.0reported
kyutai/stt-2.6b-en67.0110.0reported
openai/whisper-medium.en71.098.0reported
openai/whisper-small.en71.098.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v376.098.0reported
openai/whisper-base.en78.099.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-turbo77.098.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-fast80.099.0reported
microsoft/Phi-4-multimodal-instruct76.0115.0reported
openai/whisper-tiny.en84.099.0reported
nvidia/canary-1b-v266.0115.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-turbo-fast85.099.0reported
usefulsensors/moonshine-base81.0115.0reported
Qwen/Qwen2-Audio-7B181.0267.0reported
usefulsensors/moonshine-tiny96.0143.0reported

SimbaBench (Common Voice 19)

MT (Machine Translation)

MAFAND-MT

ModelspBLEUchrF++directionBLEUSource
facebook/nllb-200-3.3B23.950.4eng→iboreported
facebook/nllb-200-3.3B21.946.1ibo→engreported
masakhane/m2m100_418M_en_ibo_rel_news_ft51.3eng→ibo26.0reported
masakhane/m2m100_418M_ibo_en_rel_news_ft48.0ibo→eng21.9reported

FLORES-200

ModeldirectionchrFBLEUSource
AfriqueQwen-14Beng→ibo41.14reported
AfriqueQwen-14Bibo→eng52.01reported
Qwen3-14Beng→ibo11.98reported
Qwen3-14Bibo→eng29.8reported
AfriqueGemma-12Beng→ibo41.95reported
AfriqueGemma-12Bibo→eng52.73reported
Gemma3-12Beng→ibo32.27reported
Gemma3-12Bibo→eng15.07reported
AfriqueLlama-8Beng→ibo40.84reported
AfriqueLlama-8Bibo→eng49.67reported
google/madlad400-3b-mtibo→eng48.525reported
google/madlad400-3b-mteng→ibo34.613.1reported
google/madlad400-7.2b-mtibo→eng52.829.7reported
google/madlad400-7.2b-mteng→ibo38.716.1reported
google/madlad400-10.7b-mtibo→eng52.729.2reported
google/madlad400-10.7b-mteng→ibo38.516.2reported
google/madlad400-8b-lmibo→eng36.19.6reported
google/madlad400-8b-lmeng→ibo6.50.1reported

BOUQuET

ModeldirectionchrF++Source
OMT-LLaMA 8Beng→ibo?reported
OMT-LLaMA 8Bibo→eng?reported

FLORES+ 10-sample

NTREX

LLM (Large Language Models)

FLORES-200

ModelLog-perplexitySource
goldfish-models/ibo_latn_full110.84reported

Winogrande (translated)

MMLU College Medicine (translated)

MMLU Clinical Knowledge (translated)

MMLU Virology (translated)

Belebele

AfroBench

ModelIntentTopicSource
AfriqueQwen-14B78.9481.39reported
Qwen3-14B39.6660.47reported
AfriqueGemma-12B77.9469.8reported
Gemma3-12B72.5978.58reported
AfriqueLlama-8B70.7865.83reported

AfroBench-Lite

AfriMGSM(Math)

AfriXNLI

AfriMMLU

ModelAfriMMLU-ElemMathAfriMMLU-GlobalFactsAfriMMLU-GeographyAfriMMLU-MicroEconAfriMMLU-IntLawSource
GPT-4o84.049.064.058.075.0reported

SIB-200 10-sample

SAHARA

ModelLang. Avg.XNLI AccMMLU Acc.spBLEU eng→iboMGSMNER F1POS F1Reading comprehension Acc.Summarization RougeLTitle Gen spBleu-1KSource
gemini-3-pro-preview61.4190.3296.8339.7584.1370.8372.8164.120.8213.14reported
gemini-2.5-pro56.2680.6596.8338.3182.5456.169.7451.2818.4112.52reported
gpt-5-2025-08-0754.1280.6596.8327.2368.2563.4169.2461.5412.597.37reported
gpt-5.1-2025-11-1350.7280.6598.4123.3960.3254.1266.6153.8512.66.56reported
gemini-2.5-flash48.1383.8796.8334.3171.4316.6743.3661.5414.7110.41reported
claude-sonnet-4-5@2025092939.3483.8755.5626.8347.6212.2854.8743.5922.556.9reported
claude-4-sonnet-2025051441.5872.5884.1328.7139.6825.4862.8443.594.8512.4reported
gpt-4.135.2475.8173.0225.7214.2917.6138.6743.5921.387.04reported
CohereForAI/c4ai-command-a-03-202526.5766.1358.7315.474.764.0427.5430.7722.778.89reported
meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct31.6972.5868.2525.0817.4615.8718.1835.921.4710.43reported
meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct27.0559.6861.920.976.354.6515.0441.0322.0211.81reported
google/gemma-3-27b-it28.7480.6569.8424.380.03.6813.9938.4621.36.35reported
google/gemma-2-27b-it24.664.5250.7922.633.175.6619.028.2121.555.83reported
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B19.0941.9449.218.330.00.018.3630.7717.415.81reported
meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct26.3359.6858.7324.627.942.3514.1335.921.1312.45reported
Qwen/Qwen3-30B-Instruct-250722.4848.3958.738.644.769.217.5333.3316.455.32reported
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B25.0864.5257.1418.399.520.011.5233.3321.539.74reported
Tower-Babel/Babel-9B-Chat17.3340.3238.18.440.00.011.6830.7719.617.09reported
Tower-Babel/Babel-83B-Chat20.6837.155.5611.281.590.020.7633.3319.586.96reported
Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct-250719.2353.2336.516.771.593.4512.3835.917.75.58reported
google/gemma-2-9b-it19.1253.2347.6217.083.173.5713.217.9510.715.53reported
google/gemma-3-12b-it24.3970.9752.3817.384.766.1213.8628.2119.915.95reported
meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct18.9653.2331.7513.463.174.049.1325.6421.069.19reported
CohereForAI/aya-23-35B14.4138.7125.47.843.170.011.435.94.92.35reported
CohereForAI/c4ai-command-r-plus-08-202416.5648.3926.9810.653.170.013.7120.5118.676.92reported
CohereForAI/c4ai-command-r7b-12-202412.6632.2620.638.223.170.012.5230.775.730.65reported
microsoft/Phi-4-mini-instruct15.2443.5530.162.691.590.010.346.152.730.03reported
meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct14.733.8723.816.631.590.08.8338.4615.763.33reported
microsoft/Phi-3.5-mini-instruct15.6840.3230.168.180.00.08.0435.915.23.33reported
google/gemma-2-2b-it13.7943.5531.756.650.00.010.5625.645.240.74reported
CohereForAI/aya-23-8B13.333.8730.163.663.170.09.8133.333.482.18reported
google/gemma-3-4b-it18.238.7138.112.820.03.8110.4635.918.585.38reported
meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct11.0533.8730.165.220.00.06.7315.384.813.26reported

📝 Notes

Observations

  • Major language in Nigeria with large speaker population

ASR Models (32)

ModelSizeDownloadsLikes
MahmoudAshraf/mms-300m-1130-forced-aligner 0.3B 4.0M 83
facebook/mms-1b-all 1.0B 2.0M 195
facebook/seamless-m4t-v2-large 2B 66.9K 968
facebook/mms-1b-fl102 1.0B 8.7K 29
NCAIR1/Igbo-ASR 332 5
facebook/mms-1b-l1107 1.0B 280 12
espnet/xeus 60 146
johntsi/ZeroSwot-Medium_asr-cv_en-to-200 0.4B 17 0
johntsi/ZeroSwot-Large_asr-cv_en-to-200 0.4B 16 1
johntsi/ZeroSwot-Medium_asr-mustc_en-to-200 0.4B 14 0
EuriskoMobility/seamless-m4t-v2-large 2B 12 0
johntsi/ZeroSwot-Large_asr-mustc_en-to-200 0.4B 12 0
benjaminogbonna/whisper-tiny-igbo 37.8M 12 1
AstralZander/igbo_ASR 10 4
jboat/whisper-small-ig 0.2B 6 0
osanseviero/seamless-copy 2B 3 0
okezieowen/whisper-small-multilingual-naija-10-25-2024 0.2B 3 0
jonahdvt/whisper-fleurs-medium-ig_ng 0.8B 3 0
oyemade/w2v-bert-2.0-igbo-CV17.0 0.6B 1 2
jonahdvt/whisper-fleurs-medium-plus-ig_ng 0.8B 1 0

View on HuggingFace: ig: 30 | ibo: 2

TTS Models (31)

ModelSizeDownloadsLikes
k2-fsa/OmniVoice 606.0K 577
drbaph/OmniVoice-bf16 4.7K 13
WueNLP/seamless-m4t-v2-large-speech-encoder 1.7K 9
splendor1811/omnivoice-vietnamese 0.6B 672 2
gluschenko/omnivoice-onnx 397 4
edwixx/OmniVoice 163 0
okezieowen/hypaai_orpheus 3B 97 1
saheedniyi/YarnGPT-local 0.4B 35 14
WANJIAX2197/OmniVoice 30 0
kumrandy123/hypa_ai_orpheus 3B 29 0
Bgeorge/OmniVoice 25 1
ex510/OmniVoice 19 0
razi08/OmniVoice 17 0
rnjema-unima/mms-tts-ibo-baseline 36.3M 17 0
Manish993135/OmniVoice 16 0
harsha7286/OmniVoice 15 0
lopho/OmniVoice 15 0
bilalRHCH/Arabic-text-to-speech 14 0
phucpx247/OmniVoice 14 0
gubernac/OmniVoice 13 1

View on HuggingFace: ig: 30 | ibo: 1

MT Models (36)

ModelSizeDownloadsLikes
facebook/nllb-200-distilled-600M 1.1M 880
google/madlad400-3b-mt 3B 329.0K 192
facebook/nllb-200-distilled-1.3B 147.0K 181
facebook/nllb-200-3.3B 81.6K 443
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-mul-en 61.6K 89
facebook/nllb-200-1.3B 31.4K 71
Xenova/nllb-200-distilled-600M 4.4K 50
alirezamsh/small100 0.3B 3.9K 104
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-mul 3.3K 28
mradermacher/OmniTranslate-1.0-GGUF 0.6B 1.1K 3
mradermacher/OmniTranslate-1.1-GGUF 0.6B 1.1K 2
facebook/nllb-moe-54b 557 123
MihaiPopa-1/OmniTranslate-1.1 0.6B 393 0
MihaiPopa-1/OmniTranslate-1.0 0.6B 374 0
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-ig-en 126 1
HelpMumHQ/AI-translator-eng-to-9ja 0.5B 73 5
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-ig 61 1
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-sv-ig 49 0
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-fi-ig 43 0
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-nic 42 0

View on HuggingFace: ig: 30 | ibo: 6

LLM Models (40)

ModelSizeDownloadsLikes
bigscience/bloomz-560m 0.6B 1.0M 137
bigscience/bloom-560m 0.6B 164.0K 371
bigscience/bloom-1b7 2B 49.4K 122
CohereLabs/tiny-aya-global 3B 39.9K 148
bigscience/bloom-3b 3B 14.1K 94
bigscience/bloomz-3b 3B 13.3K 81
bigscience/bloom-7b1 7B 10.4K 202
bigscience/bloom-1b1 1B 7.0K 66
bigscience/bloom 176B 5.9K 5.0K
bigscience/bloomz-7b1 7B 4.2K 147
bigscience/bloomz-7b1-mt 7B 4.1K 144
bigscience/bloom-7b1-intermediate 7B 3.7K 0
bigscience/bloomz-7b1-p3 7B 3.5K 6
bigscience/bloomz 176B 3.5K 513
bigscience/bloom-1b1-intermediate 1B 3.4K 0
bigscience/bloomz-mt 176B 3.3K 32
bigscience/bloomz-1b1 1B 2.9K 33
UBC-NLP/toucan-base 0.6B 2.5K 5
bigscience/mt0-xxl 14B 2.5K 61
bigscience/bloom-1b7-intermediate 2B 2.4K 0

View on HuggingFace: ig: 30 | ibo: 10

Datasets

ASR Datasets (56)

DatasetRowsDownloadsLikes
google/fleurs 46.3K 392
fsicoli/common_voice_22_0 21.2K 16
google/WaxalNLP 2.6M 12.3K 219
fsicoli/common_voice_15_0 8.4K 6
sarulab-speech/yodas2_sidon 1.5M 6.0K 60
fsicoli/common_voice_16_0 5.1K 4
fsicoli/common_voice_17_0 3.7K 12
claudefitz/WaxalNLP 2.6M 3.6K 0
fsicoli/common_voice_21_0 3.2K 2
google/xtreme_s 3.2K 70
BolajiJsAI/WaxalNLP 2.6M 2.5K 1
SilencioNetwork/complete-voiceai-speech-dataset 1.3K 2.3K 0
ngoloan/WaxalNLP 2.0M 2.1K 0
novelwolde36/WaxalNLP 2.5M 2.0K 1
Phsntom/WaxalNLP 2.6M 1.9K 0
Ephraimmm/WaxalNLPr 2.6M 1.8K 0
fiifinketia/WaxalNLP 2.5M 1.7K 1
jml2026/complete-voiceai-speech-dataset-anonymized 1.3K 1.5K 0
zoelaenskii/zinny 2.6M 1.4K 1
0xzanuee/WaxalNLP 1.9M 1.4K 0

View on HuggingFace: ig: 30 | ibo: 26

TTS Datasets (30)

DatasetRowsDownloadsLikes
google/WaxalNLP 2.6M 12.3K 219
sarulab-speech/yodas2_sidon 1.5M 6.0K 60
claudefitz/WaxalNLP 2.6M 3.6K 0
BolajiJsAI/WaxalNLP 2.6M 2.5K 1
SilencioNetwork/complete-voiceai-speech-dataset 1.3K 2.3K 0
ngoloan/WaxalNLP 2.0M 2.1K 0
novelwolde36/WaxalNLP 2.5M 2.0K 1
Phsntom/WaxalNLP 2.6M 1.9K 0
Ephraimmm/WaxalNLPr 2.6M 1.8K 0
fiifinketia/WaxalNLP 2.5M 1.7K 1
jml2026/complete-voiceai-speech-dataset-anonymized 1.3K 1.5K 0
zoelaenskii/zinny 2.6M 1.4K 1
0xzanuee/WaxalNLP 1.9M 1.4K 0
jml2026/multilingual-accent-speech 1.3K 1.3K 0
suryatmodulus/yodas2_sidon 1.1K 0
sarulab-speech/commonvoice22_sidon 15.1M 1.1K 29
UBC-NLP/SimbaBench_dataset 748.0K 975 0
WueNLP/belebele-fleurs 65.1K 799 9
AAdonis/WS2 1.5M 521 0
WueNLP/sib-fleurs 94.4K 260 11

View on HuggingFace: ig: 17 | ibo: 13

Translation Datasets (47)

DatasetRowsDownloadsLikes
HuggingFaceFW/finetranslations 75.8K 283
facebook/flores 43.4K 97
Helsinki-NLP/opus-100 55.1M 17.9K 227
openlanguagedata/flores_plus 893.0K 15.8K 124
CohereLabs/aya_collection 514.0M 12.6K 234
gtak1/panlex-meanings 64.1M 6.3K 0
yhavinga/ccmatrix 4.0K 26
google/smol 798.0K 2.8K 94
Muennighoff/flores200 1.6K 20
gsarti/flores_101 207.0K 1.6K 32
facebook/bouquet 5.6M 1.6K 33
aiana94/polynews-parallel 5.4M 1.4K 13
ayymen/Pontoon-Translations 3.6M 1.1K 18
HuggingFaceFW/finetranslations-edu 109.0M 1.1K 27
Helsinki-NLP/tatoeba 866 56
Helsinki-NLP/opus_gnome 59.5K 635 1
IWSLT/ted_talks_iwslt 540 23
masakhane/mafand 143.0K 463 15
ayymen/Weblate-Translations 11.7M 383 18
sbmaruf/forai_ml_masakhane_mafand 136.0K 365 2

View on HuggingFace: ig: 30 | ibo: 17