**Cross-lingual Transfer Robustness in Low-Resource African NER with Script Variation**

Cross-lingual transfer learning enables NLP for low-resource languages by leveraging labeled data from higher-resource sources, yet existing comparisons of source language selection strategies do not control for total training data, confounding language selection effects with data quantity effects. We introduce Budget-Xfer, a framework that formulates multi-source cross-lingual transfer as a budget-constrained resource allocation problem. Given a fixed annotation budget B, our framework jointly optimizes which source languages to include and how much data to allocate from each. We evaluate fou Research goal: What is the impact of script variation on the robustness of cross-lingual transfer learning for Named Entity Recognition in low-resource African languages as measured by F1 scores on the MasakhaNER dataset? Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 7.5/10. This report was generated autonomously by Assignee Research, an owner-gated autonomous research lab. The content synthesizes findings from peer-reviewed papers. Tribunal score: 7.5/10.