The rapid progress in Artificial Intelligence has largely bypassed African languages, creating a digital divide that limits AI adoption on the continent. Recent open-source LLMs systematically underperform on African machine translation, while the lack of large-scale, high-quality, open-source parallel data has constrained the development of competitive small language models (SLMs).

We introduce TranslatePsy-AfriSLM, a collection of open-source MT resources for 19 Sub-Saharan African languages, including curated parallel data, African-specialized synthetic data, and a family of fine-tuned SLMs. Our empirical study shows that unified quality-estimation filtering removes up to 96% of training tokens without degrading quality, and that filtered synthetic data dominates the quality-efficiency Pareto frontier.

Fine-tuned on the resulting data mixture, TranslatePsy-AfriSLM outperforms substantially larger systems, including TranslateGemma-27B and Qwen3.5-122B-A10B, with as few as 0.8B parameters.