---
library_name: transformers
license: llama3.1
---

### Lugha-Llama: Adapting Large Language Models for African Languages

Authors: [Happy Buzaaba](https://buzaabah.github.io/), [Alexander Wettig](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~awettig/), [David Ifeoluwa Adelani](https://dadelani.github.io/), [Christiane Fellbaum](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/people/profile/fellbaum)

Low-resource african languages remain underrepresented in the large training datasets of large language models (LLMs) and, as a result, LLMs struggle to understand these languages.
We are releasing three African-centric **Lugha-Llama** models based on [Llama-3.1-8B](https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B), which achieve the *best performance* among open-source models on
[IrokoBench](https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03368), a challenging African languages benchmark and [AfriQA](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.06897), a cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering dataset for African languages (Lugha is the Kiswahili word for "language").

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All Lugha-Llama models are available on 🤗 [**huggingface hub**](https://huggingface.co/Lugha-Llama).

For the details and findings check this [Lugha-Llama blog post](https://blog.ai.princeton.edu/2025/04/22/lugha-llama-adapting-large-language-models-for-african-languages/).