Zindi brought African universities together for UmojaHack Africa, Africa’s biggest inter-university machine learning hackathon.
On 21 March 2020, Zindi hosted UmojaHack Africa, the first-ever pan-African inter-university machine learning hackathon.
Student teams at universities across Africa competed while honing their skills and developing machine learning solutions to complex real-world challenges.
The winning teams in each of three different machine learning challenges won cash and other prizes, as well as cash prizes for the universities they represented to grow data science on the continent.
“UmojaHack Africa was the first event of its kind in Africa that brought together university students from all across Africa, competing to solve some of today’s most urgent challenges using data science and machine learning,” said Celina Lee, CEO of Zindi. “At Zindi, our goal is to make AI accessible to everyone. The UmojaHack was as much about upskilling students as it was about showcasing to the world the budding talent that this continent has to offer.”
Universities from South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Algeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, and Tanzania had already signed up, with interest from universities across more than 10 African countries.
Zindi was pleased to welcome prestigious universities such as the University of Cape Town, Carnegie Mellon University Africa, University of Ibadan, AIMS Senegal, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, and the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, among many others.
“The University of Cape Town was excited to be part of the first-ever UmojaHack Africa,” said Sebnem Er, of UCT’s Department of Statistical Sciences. “We were looking forward to collaborating with Zindi to expose our students – from undergraduate, Honours, and Masters programmes such as Data Science and Advanced Analytics, as well as our doctoral degrees – to real-world problems from Africa. Participating in this event was a brilliant opportunity for our students to solve machine learning problems in real-time while sharing expertise and ideas, and to build their professional profiles and networks.”
Sponsors for the event included African Bank and Alliance4AI, while Data Science Nigeria provided support as a regional partner for the event.
African Bank’s Executive of Credit and Data Science, Vere Millican, said African Bank was delighted to be involved with UmojaHack Africa. “Just this month African Bank welcomed 38 new data scientist trainees into our growing team. We now have a total of 77 data science professionals, 20 of which are currently attending the Explore Data Science Academy. We are committed to upskilling and employing brilliant data scientists and welcome opportunities like this to develop and find young talent. What better platform than a competition which showcases the skills of the best talent across Africa.”
In teams of up to four people, more than 500 participants submitted machine learning solutions to one of three pressing challenges hosted on the Zindi data science competition platform. The solutions were automatically ranked using Zindi’s objective scoring system, and the winning solutions won a share of $2000 USD, as well as a share of $15 000 USD for their university. There were also other prizes for runners-up in each challenge.
Zindi is a data science competition platform on a mission to build the data science ecosystem in Africa. The platform hosts a community of more than 9000 data scientists across Africa, dedicated to solving the world’s most pressing challenges through machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Data scientists and students came to Zindi to hone their skills, build their professional profile, connect with job opportunities, and to share ideas with their peers across Africa and beyond.
