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

Wolof

wol / wo

🌍 General Information

wol
wo
wolof
nucl1347
Niger–Congo
Latin (Wolof alphabet) Arabic ( Wolofal ) Garay script
8.2 million
9.5 million
5500000 (10⁶+)
safe
Gambia, Mauritania, Senegal
Ouolof, Volof, Walaf, Waro-Waro, Yallof

🗺️ Language Use

Data from CLEAR Global's Language Use Data Platform.

👥 Actors (10)

Baamtu (Startup)

Digital transformation and AI consulting firm. Develops custom AI solutions for clients including government and financial institutions. Has TTS and c...

CONCREE (Startup)

Senegalese social enterprise originally focused on entrepreneurship support (virtual incubation, business training). Has expanded into AI/NLP for Wolo...

Digital Umuganda (Startup)

Rwandan AI and open data company building voice infrastructure for African languages. "Umuganda" is the Rwandan tradition of community service -- Digi...

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...

GalsenAI (Research Community)

Community of young Senegalese AI/data science enthusiasts. Runs training, meetups, hackathons, and collaborative projects. Strong focus on Wolof NLP w...

Jokalante (Startup)

Senegalese social enterprise ("jokalante" = "facilitate dialogue" in Wolof) providing digital solutions for rural and underserved populations. Core pl...

LAfricaMobile (Startup)

Communication platform serving 300+ companies across Africa. Provides messaging (SMS, WhatsApp Business API, Voice), USSD, and AI-powered Text-to-Spee...

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...

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...

YUX Design / Kitala AI (Startup)

African design and innovation firm with offices in Dakar, Accra, Lagos, Abuja, Brazzaville, Kigali, and Nairobi. ~50 staff including ML engineers and ...

🤖 NLP & Tech Resources

✓ AfroLID
✓ Google Translate: 2024
✓ NLLB-200
✓ M2M-100
✓ Mozilla Common Voice: ☑️
✓ MADLAD-400 Docs: 871 MAD-Docs
✓ MADLAD-400 Sentences: 25400 MAD-Sents
✓ Fineweb2: 💬
✓ FLEURS
✓ MAFAND
✓ AfriNLLB
✓ MMS-ASR
✓ MMS-LID
✓ Omnilingual ASR
✓ SimbaBench
✓ WaxalNLP

Benchmarks

ASR (Speech-to-Text)

FLEURS-102 test

ModelCERSource
facebook/mms-1b-fl10211.5reported

FLEURS-102 dev

ModelCERSource
facebook/mms-1b-fl10211.2reported

PazaBench (aggregated)

ModelCERWERSource
facebook/omniASR-LLM-7B4.013.0reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-7B-ZS6.022.0reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-1B4.014.0reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-3B4.013.0reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-300M5.016.0reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-7B5.020.0reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-1B8.032.0reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-3B7.025.0reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-300M10.040.0reported
microsoft/paza-mms-1b-all25.075.0reported
facebook/mms-1b-all16.059.0reported
facebook/mms-1b-fl10217.061.0reported
microsoft/paza-Phi-4-multimodal-instruct46.097.0reported
nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v361.098.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-conformer-rel-pos-large-960h-ft41.0100.0reported
facebook/data2vec-audio-large-960h44.098.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-conformer-rope-large-960h-ft43.099.0reported
facebook/hubert-large-ls960-ft41.096.0reported
facebook/hubert-xlarge-ls960-ft42.097.0reported
microsoft/paza-whisper-large-v3-turbo54.098.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-large-960h-lv60-self44.097.0reported
facebook/data2vec-audio-base-960h46.0100.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-large-robust-ft-libri-960h44.099.0reported
nvidia/canary-qwen-2.5b53.0107.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-large-960h50.099.0reported
ibm/granite-speech-3.3-2b49.0100.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-base-960h54.0100.0reported
openai/whisper-large-v3-turbo76.099.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-turbo-acc65.098.0reported
distil-whisper/distil-large-v365.098.0reported
ibm/granite-speech-3.3-8b54.0105.0reported
openai/whisper-large68.098.0reported
distil-whisper/distil-medium.en65.099.0reported
openai/whisper-large-v381.099.0reported
distil-whisper/distil-large-v268.099.0reported
Qwen/Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct63.0102.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-acc78.099.0reported
openai/whisper-large-v278.099.0reported
kyutai/stt-2.6b-en62.0106.0reported
openai/whisper-medium.en70.099.0reported
openai/whisper-small.en73.099.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v366.098.0reported
openai/whisper-base.en72.099.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-turbo70.099.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-fast68.099.0reported
microsoft/Phi-4-multimodal-instruct65.0110.0reported
openai/whisper-tiny.en76.099.0reported
nvidia/canary-1b-v260.0113.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-turbo-fast84.0100.0reported
usefulsensors/moonshine-base71.0110.0reported
Qwen/Qwen2-Audio-7B151.0178.0reported
usefulsensors/moonshine-tiny84.0134.0reported

SimbaBench (Kallaama)

MT (Machine Translation)

FLORES-200

ModeldirectionchrFBLEUSource
AfriqueQwen-14Beng→wol8.41—reported
AfriqueQwen-14Bwol→eng24.15—reported
Qwen3-14Beng→wol10.23—reported
Qwen3-14Bwol→eng24.99—reported
AfriqueGemma-12Beng→wol7.11—reported
AfriqueGemma-12Bwol→eng22.53—reported
Gemma3-12Beng→wol7.6—reported
Gemma3-12Bwol→eng12.38—reported
AfriqueLlama-8Beng→wol8.93—reported
AfriqueLlama-8Bwol→eng22.37—reported
AfriNLLB 548M (Pruned Iterative FT)eng→wol28.636.97reported
AfriNLLB 548M (Pruned Iterative FT)wol→eng39.5817.11reported
AfriNLLB 548M (Pruned Iterative FT)fra→wol25.454.52reported
AfriNLLB 548M (Pruned Iterative FT)wol→fra37.0314.97reported
NLLB-600Meng→wol28.636.97reported
NLLB-600Mwol→eng39.5817.11reported
NLLB-600Mfra→wol21.843.73reported
NLLB-600Mwol→fra34.5912.96reported
google/madlad400-3b-mtwol→eng28.46.6reported
google/madlad400-3b-mteng→wol13.21.2reported
google/madlad400-7.2b-mtwol→eng29.36.7reported
google/madlad400-7.2b-mteng→wol12.61reported
google/madlad400-10.7b-mtwol→eng29.87.1reported
google/madlad400-10.7b-mteng→wol15.41.4reported
google/madlad400-8b-lmwol→eng19.73.2reported
google/madlad400-8b-lmeng→wol3.50reported

BOUQuET

ModeldirectionchrF++Source
OMT-LLaMA 8Beng→wol?reported
OMT-LLaMA 8Bwol→eng?reported

FLORES+ 10-sample

ModeldirectionSpBLEUChrFSource
google/gemini-2.5-flashwol→eng18.145.3reported
google/gemini-2.5-flasheng→wol10.433.6reported
google/gemini-2.5-prowol→eng21.345.4reported
google/gemini-2.5-proeng→wol11.434.6reported
google/gemini-3-pro-previewwol→eng32.355.7reported
google/gemini-3-pro-previeweng→wol13.538.1reported
openai/gpt-5.2eng→wol11.735.0reported
openai/gpt-5.2wol→eng12.037.5reported

NTREX

LLM (Large Language Models)

FLORES-200

ModelLog-perplexitySource
goldfish-models/wol_latn_full141.12reported

AfroBench

ModelIntentTopicSource
AfriqueQwen-14B31.158.13reported
Qwen3-14B32.8258.13reported
AfriqueGemma-12B29.3148.49reported
Gemma3-12B36.2458.8reported
AfriqueLlama-8B19.8138.75reported

AfroBench-Lite

ModelAvg ScoreSource
CohereForAI/aya-10129.2reported
google/gemma-1.1-7b-it22.7reported
meta-llama/Llama-2-7b16.7reported
meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B16.0reported
meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B17.2reported
MaLA-LM/LLaMAX3-8B16.6reported
google/gemma-2-9b26.2reported
google/gemma-2-27b26.9reported
meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-70B25.1reported
AfroLLaMa 8B14.2reported
Gemini 1.5 Pro29.7reported
GPT-4o43.5reported
google/gemma-3-27b-it30.9reported
Gemini 2.0 Flash63.7reported
GPT-4.149.0reported
Claude 4.0 Sonnet39.7reported
Claude 3.7 Sonnet46.4reported
Claude 4.5 Sonnet43.9reported
Gemini 2.5 Flash57.8reported
Gemini 2.5 Pro66.9reported
GPT-563.4reported
Gemini 3 Pro68.9reported

AfriMGSM(Math)

AfriXNLI

AfriMMLU

ModelAfriMMLU-ElemMathAfriMMLU-GlobalFactsAfriMMLU-GeographyAfriMMLU-MicroEconAfriMMLU-IntLawSource
GPT-4o61.036.027.019.038.0reported

SIB-200 10-sample

📝 Notes

Observations

  • Dominant language of Senegal, major regional lingua franca
  • Senegal not in survey but important WCA country (summit host)

ASR Models (31)

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
CAYTU/whosper-large — 380 3
facebook/mms-1b-l1107 1.0B 280 12
M9and2M/whisper-small-wolof 0.2B 60 4
espnet/xeus — 60 146
kingabzpro/wav2vec2-large-xlsr-53-wolof 0.3B 29 3
abdouaziiz/wav2vec2-xls-r-300m-wolof-lm — 22 5
johntsi/ZeroSwot-Medium_asr-cv_en-to-200 0.4B 17 0
cibfaye/whisper-wolof 0.2B 16 1
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
speechbrain/asr-wav2vec2-dvoice-wolof — 11 4
aioxlabs/dvoice-wolof — 8 0
ngia/whisper-small-wolof 0.2B 5 0
osanseviero/seamless-copy 2B 3 0

View on HuggingFace: wo: 30 | wol: 1

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
CONCREE/Adia_TTS 0.9B 300 11
edwixx/OmniVoice — 163 0
bilalfaye/speecht5_tts-wolof 0.1B 89 1
bilalfaye/speecht5_tts-wolof-v0.2 0.1B 63 1
AYI-TEKK/tts-wo 0.1B 30 0
WANJIAX2197/OmniVoice — 30 0
AYI-TEKK/tts-v2 0.1B 28 0
AYI-TEKK/Adia_TTS 0.9B 27 0
Bgeorge/OmniVoice — 25 1
rnjema-unima/mms-tts-wol-baseline 36.3M 21 0
Manish993135/OmniVoice — 16 0
bilalRHCH/Arabic-text-to-speech — 14 0
gubernac/OmniVoice — 13 1
EBINSHAJI1999/OmniVoice — 12 0
Citrus-777/OmniVoice — 12 0

View on HuggingFace: wo: 30 | wol: 1

MT Models (38)

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
JustFrederik/nllb-200-distilled-600M-ct2-int8 — 925 1
facebook/nllb-moe-54b — 557 123
MihaiPopa-1/OmniTranslate-1.1 0.6B 393 0
MihaiPopa-1/OmniTranslate-1.0 0.6B 374 0
JustFrederik/nllb-200-1.3B-ct2-int8 — 200 0
JustFrederik/nllb-200-distilled-600M-ct2-float16 — 157 0
winstxnhdw/nllb-200-distilled-1.3B-ct2-int8 — 141 6
JustFrederik/nllb-200-distilled-1.3B-ct2-int8 — 116 2
JustFrederik/nllb-200-distilled-600M-ct2 — 65 2

View on HuggingFace: wo: 30 | wol: 8

LLM Models (36)

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
bigscience/bloomz-1b7 2B 2.8K 23
UBC-NLP/toucan-base 0.6B 2.5K 5
bigscience/bloom-1b7-intermediate 2B 2.4K 0

View on HuggingFace: wo: 30 | wol: 6

Datasets

ASR Datasets (34)

DatasetRowsDownloadsLikes
google/fleurs — 46.3K 392
sarulab-speech/yodas2_sidon 1.5M 6.0K 60
google/xtreme_s — 3.2K 70
BolajiJsAI/WaxalNLP 2.6M 2.5K 1
suryatmodulus/yodas2_sidon — 1.1K 0
UBC-NLP/SimbaBench_dataset 748.0K 975 0
WueNLP/belebele-fleurs 65.1K 799 9
satwikguptha/xtreme_s — 364 0
nanexxx/fleurs — 313 0
WueNLP/sib-fleurs 94.4K 260 11
YuRiVeRTi/V1Q 186.0K 201 3
soynade-research/Wolof-ASR-Data 86.5K 189 2
facebook/2M-Belebele 59.1K 183 12
cahya/fleurs — 169 1
galsenai/wolof-audio-data 35.1K 96 2
serge-wilson/wolof-french-asr 47.9K 69 0
vonewman/wolof-audio-data 35.1K 50 1
OlameMend/soreva — 40 7
developeranalyser/new_train_data — 32 3
serge-wilson/wolof_speech_transcription 14.8K 31 3

View on HuggingFace: wo: 18 | wol: 16

TTS Datasets (10)

DatasetRowsDownloadsLikes
sarulab-speech/yodas2_sidon 1.5M 6.0K 60
BolajiJsAI/WaxalNLP 2.6M 2.5K 1
suryatmodulus/yodas2_sidon — 1.1K 0
UBC-NLP/SimbaBench_dataset 748.0K 975 0
WueNLP/belebele-fleurs 65.1K 799 9
WueNLP/sib-fleurs 94.4K 260 11
galsenai/wolof_tts 40.0K 225 10
YuRiVeRTi/V1Q 186.0K 201 3
galsenai/anta_women_tts 19.9K 182 9
OlameMend/soreva — 40 7

View on HuggingFace: wo: 7 | wol: 3

Translation Datasets (60)

DatasetRowsDownloadsLikes
HuggingFaceFW/finetranslations — 75.8K 283
facebook/flores — 43.4K 97
openlanguagedata/flores_plus 893.0K 15.8K 124
CohereLabs/aya_collection 514.0M 12.6K 234
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
Helsinki-NLP/tatoeba — 866 56
masakhane/mafand 143.0K 463 15
ayymen/Weblate-Translations 11.7M 383 18
sbmaruf/forai_ml_masakhane_mafand 136.0K 365 2
Helsinki-NLP/opus_ubuntu 37.4K 354 4
mteb/NTREXBitextMining 2.0K 309 1
mteb/FloresBitextMining 2.0K 303 1
visheratin/laion-coco-nllb 894.0K 255 44
cointegrated/panlex-meanings 157.0M 255 13

View on HuggingFace: wo: 30 | wol: 30