African Teams Build Efficient Local Language Models

Jade Abbott, CTO and co-founder of Lelapa AI, outlines practical methods for building language models under severe infrastructure and data constraints in Africa. She recommends dividing problems, prioritizing smaller efficient models (quantization, distillation, edge deployment), creating synthetic human-in-the-loop data, and enforcing continuous evaluation. These measures enable privacy-aware, deployable LLMs that consume less compute, operate offline or on edge devices, and better serve low-resource languages.