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

Yoruba

yor / yo

🌍 General Information

yor
yo
yoruba
yoru1245
Niger–Congo
Latin ( Yoruba alphabet ) Arabic ( Anjemi ) Oduduwa script Yoruba Braille
48 million
2.0 million
54000000 (10⁶+)
safe
Benin, Nigeria, Togo
Yariba, Yooba, Yorouba, Yorùbá, Èdè Yorùbá

🗺️ Language Use

Data from CLEAR Global's Language Use Data Platform.

👥 Actors (14)

Organization Name (Startup)

Brief description of the organization and what they do. Can span multiple lines.

AdwumaTech AI (Startup)

AdwumaTech AI provides enterprise-grade AI training data infrastructure powered by African engineering talent. Core offerings include RLHF for code ge...

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...

Ghana NLP / Khaya AI (Research Community)

Ghana NLP is an open-source initiative focused on Natural Language Processing for Ghanaian and African languages. They developed Khaya, the first AI-p...

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
✓ mBERT
✓ NLLB-200
✓ M2M-100
✓ Mozilla Common Voice
✓ MADLAD-400 Docs: 52100 MAD-Docs
✓ MADLAD-400 Sentences: 1200000 MAD-Sents
✓ Aya-101
✓ Fineweb2: 💬
✓ FLEURS
✓ AfriHate
✓ NaijaVoices
✓ AfriNLLB
✓ MMS-ASR
✓ MMS-TTS
✓ MMS-LID
✓ Omnilingual ASR
✓ SimbaBench
✓ WaxalNLP

🎙️ Common Voice

8.1
4852
3451
♂ 30.0% / ♀ 37.0%

Benchmarks

ASR (Speech-to-Text)

FLEURS-102 test

ModelCERSource
facebook/mms-1b-fl10216.1reported

FLEURS-102 dev

ModelCERSource
facebook/mms-1b-fl10217.0reported

FLEURS test

ModelWERSource
facebook/mms-1b-all49.4reported

PazaBench (aggregated)

ModelCERWERSource
facebook/omniASR-LLM-7B14.039.0reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-7B-ZS16.047.0reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-1B15.043.0reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-3B8.025.0reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-300M14.039.0reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-7B15.045.0reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-1B18.053.0reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-3B18.052.0reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-300M19.059.0reported
microsoft/paza-mms-1b-all13.041.0reported
facebook/mms-1b-all14.044.0reported
facebook/mms-1b-fl10214.044.0reported
microsoft/paza-Phi-4-multimodal-instruct50.098.0reported
nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v352.099.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-conformer-rel-pos-large-960h-ft54.0109.0reported
facebook/data2vec-audio-large-960h56.0104.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-conformer-rope-large-960h-ft57.0106.0reported
facebook/hubert-large-ls960-ft50.0102.0reported
facebook/hubert-xlarge-ls960-ft50.0101.0reported
microsoft/paza-whisper-large-v3-turbo59.096.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-large-960h-lv60-self54.099.0reported
facebook/data2vec-audio-base-960h58.0110.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-large-robust-ft-libri-960h53.0104.0reported
nvidia/canary-qwen-2.5b67.0114.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-large-960h65.0106.0reported
ibm/granite-speech-3.3-2b67.0109.0reported
facebook/wav2vec2-base-960h75.0103.0reported
openai/whisper-large-v3-turbo58.091.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-turbo-acc63.094.0reported
distil-whisper/distil-large-v368.098.0reported
ibm/granite-speech-3.3-8b77.0121.0reported
openai/whisper-large67.096.0reported
distil-whisper/distil-medium.en73.099.0reported
openai/whisper-large-v370.097.0reported
distil-whisper/distil-large-v273.099.0reported
Qwen/Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct76.0109.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-acc72.098.0reported
openai/whisper-large-v272.098.0reported
kyutai/stt-2.6b-en71.0114.0reported
openai/whisper-medium.en74.098.0reported
openai/whisper-small.en74.098.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v378.098.0reported
openai/whisper-base.en77.099.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-turbo75.098.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-fast78.099.0reported
microsoft/Phi-4-multimodal-instruct83.0121.0reported
openai/whisper-tiny.en82.099.0reported
nvidia/canary-1b-v276.0123.0reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-turbo-fast83.099.0reported
usefulsensors/moonshine-base85.0119.0reported
Qwen/Qwen2-Audio-7B144.0190.0reported
usefulsensors/moonshine-tiny92.0133.0reported

SimbaBench (Yoruba Voice)

FLEURS

TTS (Text-to-Speech)

SimbaBench (bibleTTS, Yoruba)

ModelWERUTMOSPESQSource
facebook/mms-tts26.993.452.61reported

MT (Machine Translation)

MAFAND-MT

ModelspBLEUchrF++directionBLEUSource
facebook/nllb-200-3.3B14.436.3eng→yorreported
facebook/nllb-200-3.3B24.446.7yor→engreported
masakhane/m2m100_418M_en_yor_rel_news_ft36.3eng→yor13.9reported
masakhane/m2m100_418M_yor_en_rel_news_ft41.0yor→eng18.0reported

FLORES-200

ModeldirectionchrFBLEUSource
AfriqueQwen-14Beng→yor27.45reported
AfriqueQwen-14Byor→eng45.35reported
Qwen3-14Beng→yor10.25reported
Qwen3-14Byor→eng27.94reported
AfriqueGemma-12Beng→yor28.59reported
AfriqueGemma-12Byor→eng44.72reported
Gemma3-12Beng→yor13.91reported
Gemma3-12Byor→eng17.14reported
AfriqueLlama-8Beng→yor27.36reported
AfriqueLlama-8Byor→eng42.43reported
AfriNLLB 548M (Pruned Iterative FT)eng→yor29.28.03reported
AfriNLLB 548M (Pruned Iterative FT)yor→eng41.0818.62reported
NLLB-600Meng→yor22.874.32reported
NLLB-600Myor→eng39.7317.61reported
google/madlad400-3b-mtyor→eng34.911.9reported
google/madlad400-3b-mteng→yor19.72.6reported
google/madlad400-7.2b-mtyor→eng40.817.4reported
google/madlad400-7.2b-mteng→yor20.32.7reported
google/madlad400-10.7b-mtyor→eng40.717.8reported
google/madlad400-10.7b-mteng→yor20.72.9reported
google/madlad400-8b-lmyor→eng266.3reported
google/madlad400-8b-lmeng→yor3.20reported

BOUQuET

ModeldirectionchrF++Source
OMT-LLaMA 8Beng→yor?reported
OMT-LLaMA 8Byor→eng?reported

FLORES+ 10-sample

NTREX

LLM (Large Language Models)

FLORES-200

ModelLog-perplexitySource
goldfish-models/yor_latn_full123.24reported

AfroBench

ModelIntentTopicSource
AfriqueQwen-14B81.8880.42reported
Qwen3-14B38.2854.86reported
AfriqueGemma-12B76.0970.31reported
Gemma3-12B67.1266.67reported
AfriqueLlama-8B73.3861.91reported

AfroBench-Lite

AfriMGSM(Math)

AfriXNLI

AfriMMLU

ModelAfriMMLU-ElemMathAfriMMLU-GlobalFactsAfriMMLU-GeographyAfriMMLU-MicroEconAfriMMLU-IntLawSource
GPT-4o80.042.053.051.075.0reported

SIB-200 10-sample

📝 Notes

Observations

  • Appears in Survey Focus 1 for Benin (2026 UNICEF WCAR Local Languages Survey)
  • Major language in Nigeria and Benin with large speaker population

ASR Models (31)

ModelSizeDownloadsLikes
openai/whisper-large-v3-turbo 0.8B 6.5M 2.9K
openai/whisper-large-v3 2B 4.8M 5.6K
facebook/mms-1b-all 1.0B 2.0M 195
openai/whisper-small 1.9M 547
openai/whisper-base 1.7M 264
Systran/faster-whisper-tiny 1.2M 19
openai/whisper-tiny 761.0K 424
Systran/faster-whisper-large-v3 741.0K 556
openai/whisper-medium 550.0K 283
Systran/faster-whisper-small 416.0K 29
Systran/faster-whisper-large-v2 138.0K 43
deepdml/faster-whisper-large-v3-turbo-ct2 90.4K 195
openai/whisper-large 2B 84.8K 542
openai/whisper-large-v2 2B 69.5K 1.8K
guillaumekln/faster-whisper-large-v2 24.9K 211
xkeyC/whisper-large-v3-turbo-gguf 0.8B 17.2K 31
guillaumekln/faster-whisper-tiny 16.3K 9
guillaumekln/faster-whisper-base 5.7K 10
neurlang/ipa-whisper-base 72.6M 683 23
espnet/xeus 60 146

View on HuggingFace: yo: 30 | yor: 1

TTS Models (31)

ModelSizeDownloadsLikes
k2-fsa/OmniVoice 606.0K 577
fishaudio/s2-pro 5B 52.1K 842
drbaph/OmniVoice-bf16 4.7K 13
drbaph/s2-pro-fp8 2.2K 18
WueNLP/seamless-m4t-v2-large-speech-encoder 1.7K 9
mlx-community/fish-audio-s2-pro-bf16 5B 1.7K 16
splendor1811/omnivoice-vietnamese 0.6B 672 2
gluschenko/omnivoice-onnx 397 4
baicai1145/s2-pro-w4a16-late7attn-ffnmix 5B 109 1
okezieowen/hypaai_orpheus 3B 97 1
ImhotepAI/yoruba-tts 38 2
saheedniyi/YarnGPT-local 0.4B 35 14
kumrandy123/hypa_ai_orpheus 3B 29 0
naijaml/f5-tts-yoruba 25 1
gubernac/OmniVoice 13 1
rnjema-unima/mms-tts-yor-baseline 36.3M 12 0
SummerSmile/s2-pro 5B 10 0
audo/seamless-m4t-v2-large 2B 9 23
zeustek/Wayo_GPT 0.4B 3 0
vedanshu93/s2-pro 5B 3 0

View on HuggingFace: yo: 30 | yor: 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
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
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-yo-en 257 0
HelpMumHQ/AI-translator-eng-to-9ja 0.5B 73 5
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-yo-sv 64 0
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-yo-fr 61 0
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-yo-es 59 0

View on HuggingFace: yo: 30 | yor: 6

LLM Models (41)

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/bloom-7b1 7B 10.4K 202
bigscience/bloom-1b1 1B 7.0K 66
ai-forever/mGPT 6.6K 270
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: yo: 30 | yor: 11

Datasets

ASR Datasets (54)

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: yo: 28 | yor: 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
WueNLP/sib-fleurs 94.4K 260 11
bdallhrajh371/WaxalNLP 2.6M 250 0

View on HuggingFace: yo: 17 | yor: 13

Translation Datasets (55)

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
refine-ai/subscene 3.2K 2
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
masakhane/mafand 143.0K 463 15
ayymen/Weblate-Translations 11.7M 383 18
UdS-LSV/menyo20k_mt 370 4

View on HuggingFace: yo: 30 | yor: 25