African AI Platform To Host Hackathon For Regional Universities In March

On 21 March 2020, Zindi will host UmojaHack Africa, the first-ever pan-African inter-university machine learning hackathon. Student teams at universities across Africa will compete 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 will win cash and other prizes, as well as winning cash prizes for the universities they represent to grow data science on the continent.

Whilst there don’t seem to be any local universities participating, the existence of such a platform creates potential participation opportunities in later editions of the UmojoHack Africa hackathon.

UmojaHack Africa is the first event of its kind in Africa that will bring together university students from all across Africa, competing to solve some of today’s most urgent challenges using data science and machine learning.

At Zindi, our goal is to make AI accessible to everyone. The UmojaHack is as much about upskilling students as it is about showcasing to the world the budding talent that this continent has to offer.

Celina Lee – Zindi CEO

Universities from South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Algeria, Senegal, Ethiopia and Tanzania have already signed up, with interest from universities across more than 10 African countries.

The event being hosted by the University of Cape Town will include sponsorship from the Africa Bank, Alliance4AI with Data Science Nigeria providing support as a regional partner for the event.

In teams of up to four people, more than 500 participants will submit machine learning solutions to one of three pressing challenges hosted on the Zindi data science competition platform. The solutions will be automatically ranked using Zindi’s objective scoring system, and the winning solutions will win a share of $2000 USD, as well as a share of $15 000 USD for their university. There will also be other prizes for runner’s up in each challenge.

Also read, Zindi Pays Africans For Solving African Problems Using Data Science