AfriGuard: Safety and Robust Refusal For African Languages
Paper • 2610.26474 • Published
AfriGuard is a human-annotated safety dataset covering 10 African languages: Amharic, Hausa, Igbo, Oromo, Shona, Swahili, Twi, Wolof, Yoruba, and Zulu. Each example contains a culturally grounded scenario and prompt/response pair in English and the target language, labeled with majority-vote annotations (safety category and safe/unsafe) from three native-speaker annotators.
Paper: AfriGuard: Safety and Robust Refusal For African Languages
Each language config provides three splits:
| Split | Size (per language) | Description |
|---|---|---|
train |
~950–980 rows | 50% of scenario-level data |
validation |
20 rows | Few-shot pool: 10 categories × {safe, unsafe}. The first 10 rows cover all 10 classes (5 safe / 5 unsafe); rows 11–20 cover all 10 classes with the opposite label. |
test |
~980–1000 rows | 50% of scenario-level data. 100% of test scenario_ids are unseen in train. |
Split properties:
All language configs share the same schema:
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
id |
Unique example id |
scenario_id |
Scenario grouping id |
scenario |
Full scenario description (context, severity levels, example prompts, AI safety application) |
country |
Country context of the scenario |
target_language |
Target language code |
prompt / response |
English prompt and model response |
prompt_translated / response_translated |
Final human-verified translations |
majority_vote_class |
Majority-vote safety category from 3 annotators |
majority_vote_safe_unsafe |
Majority-vote safe/unsafe label from 3 annotators |
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("israel/AfriGuard", "amharic")
train, val, test = ds["train"], ds["validation"], ds["test"]
# Few-shot: the first 10 validation rows cover all 10 categories (5 safe / 5 unsafe)
fewshot_10 = val.select(range(10))
@misc{azime2026afriguardsafetyrobustrefusal,
title={AfriGuard: Safety and Robust Refusal For African Languages},
author={Israel Abebe Azime and Jesujoba O. Alabi and Iffat Maab and Alexander D. Cai and Tadesse Destaw Belay and Atnafu Lambebo Tonja and Jonas Kgomo and Folasade Alabi and Salomey Osei and Saminu Muhammad Aliyu and Nkechinyere Faith Aguobi and Bontu Fufa Balcha and Blessing Sibanda and Davis David and Mouhamadane Mboup and Daud Abolade and Neo Putini and Louis Powell and Kiant'e Brantley and Philipp Slusallek and Dietrich Klakow and Julia Kreutzer},
year={2026},
eprint={2610.26474},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26474},
}