We present AfriNLLB, a series of lightweight models for efficient translation from and into African languages. AfriNLLB supports 15 language pairs (30 translation directions), including Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Amharic, Somali, Zulu, Lingala, Afrikaans, Wolof, and Egyptian Arabic, as well as other African Union official languages such as Arabic (MSA), French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Our training data covers bidirectional translation between English and 13 languages, and between French and two languages (Lingala and Wolof).

AfriNLLB models are based on NLLB-200 600M, which we compress using iterative layer pruning and quantisation. We fine-tuned the pruned models on parallel corpora we curated for African languages, employing knowledge distillation from a larger teacher model. This project aims at enabling efficient deployment of translation models for African languages in resource-constrained settings.

Our evaluation results demonstrate that AfriNLLB models achieve performance comparable to the baseline while being significantly faster. We release two versions of the AfriNLLB models, a Transformers version that allows further fine-tuning and a CTranslate2 version for efficient inference. Moreover, we release all the training data that we used for fine-tuning the baseline and pruned models to facilitate further research.

AfriNLLB has been motivated by multiple goals:

• Gathering and curating bilingual training datasets for African languages
• Building lightweight MT models specialized in translating African languages, utilizing compression approaches such as pruning and quantization
• Open-sourcing the code, training data, and models we have created
• Sharing our approaches and lessons learned to facilitate future work in this area

If you use any of AfriNLLB models, datasets, or approaches, please cite the following paper:

@inproceedings{moslem-etal-2026-afrinllb,
    title = "{A}fri{NLLB}: Efficient Translation Models for African Languages",
    author = "Moslem, Yasmin  and
      Wassie, Aman Kassahun  and
      Gizachew, Amanuel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on African Natural Language Processing (AfricaNLP)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09373"
}