Natural language processing (NLP) technology has seen tremendous improvements in recent years but most of these successes have been concentrated in languages with large amounts of data. In this talk, I will discuss challenges and potential solutions on the way to scaling NLP to more of the world's 7000 languages. In particular, I will highlight recent progress in NLP for African languages and present methods that are applicable to languages with limited data such as employing alternative sources of data and multi-modal information.