What Do Our Benchmarks Actually Measure? Evaluation Challenges for African Language AI

Tea Talks July 24, 2026 In this talk, I explore the growing gap between advances in language modeling and the evaluation methods used to assess them. Drawing on emerging analyses of African language benchmarks—including work examining task difficulty and model performance variation—I argue that rethinking evaluation is essential for enabling truly multilingual AI. Moving forward, evaluation frameworks must better reflect linguistic diversity, community priorities, and the complex sociotechnical contexts in which these languages are used.