Sunflower: A New Approach To Expanding Coverage of African Languages in Large Language Models
Authors
Benjamin Akera
Evelyn Nafula Ouma
Gilbert Yiga
Patrick Walukagga
Phionah Natukunda
Trevor Saaka
Solomon Nsumba
Lilian Teddy Nabukeera
Joel Muhanguzi
Imran Sekalala
Nimpamya Janat Namara
Engineer Bainomugisha
Ernest Mwebaze
John Quinn
Abstract
There are more than 2000 living languages in Africa, most of which have been bypassed by advances in language technology. Current leading LLMs exhibit strong performance on a number of the most common languages (e.g. Swahili or Yoruba), but prioritise support for the languages with the most speakers first, resulting in piecemeal ability across disparate languages. We contend that a regionally focussed approach is more efficient, and present a case study for Uganda, a country with high linguistic diversity. We describe the development of Sunflower 14B and 32B, a pair of models based on Qwen 3 with state of the art comprehension in the majority of all Ugandan languages. These models are open source and can be used to reduce language barriers in a number of important practical applications.
