The State of Large Language Models for African Languages: Progress and Challenges

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, these advancements have primarily concentrated on high-resource languages, leaving many low-resource languages, particularly African languages, largely overlooked. Africa has over 2,000 languages [Ethnologue, 2025], the majority of which face significant challenges such as a lack of data, limited computational resources, insufficient NLP tools, and the absence of standardized benchmarks. This study presents a three-stage review to evaluate LLMs' current status, challenges, and prospects for African languages. The first stage investigates both commercial and open-source LLMs models with more than 7 billion parameters regarding their support for African languages [Wang et al., 2024]. The second stage examines foundational multilingual models that have significantly influenced NLP research and development.