Africa’s largest inter-university hackathon brings students together on Zindi for data science, for good
More than $10 000 USD in prizes were awarded to data science students from 9 African countries
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, April 8, 2021/ -- UmojaHack Africa 2021 was an unprecedented success, bringing more
than 1000 students from 126 universities across Africa to compete on
Zindi (www.Zindi.africa) in a virtual machine learning hackathon on the
weekend of 27-28 March. More than $10 000 USD in prizes were awarded to
data science students from 9 African countries, and more than 8500
submissions were made to solve three real-world machine learning
challenges on Zindi.
Students from 21 African countries joined the event, representing
Algeria, Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Malawi, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan,
Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
They participated in three different machine learning challenges: a
financial resilience prediction challenge, a logistics challenge for
African B2B service provider Sendy (www.Sendyit.com), and a computational biology challenge using the DeepChain™
(www.DeepChain.bio) platform developed by InstaDeep. The winning
solutions developed by Zindi users will be shared with these
organisations and deployed in real-world applications.
Winning words
In winning second place in the Sendy Delivery Rider Response Challenge,
Tony Mipawa, a data science student from the University of Dodoma,
Tanzania, epitomised the spirit of Zindi and of UmojaHack A year ago,
Tony was a data science novice until he participated in Zindi’s first
ever Mentorship Programme in 2020. He has grown in leaps and bounds
since then, as evidenced by his prize-winning submission in this
hackathon, less than a year later.
“I’m very happy with the outcome,” Tony said at the awards ceremony. “My advice is, whenever there is an opportunity to learn, you should take
it. Learning is all about passion; whenever there is an opportunity to
learn, put your whole effort into it, do it well. Try to learn from
anyone you meet. I would like to thank Zindi for what that mentorship
programme gave me.”
Global support
UmojaHack Africa 2021 was sponsored by some leading names in the global
and African tech, AI and financial sectors, including InstaDeep (www.InstaDeep.com), Standard Bank Group (www.StandardBank.com), Microsoft (www.Microsoft.com), DeepMind (www.DeepMind.com), NVIDIA (www.NVIDIA.com), and Old Mutual (www.OldMutual.com). They were integral in making the event a success by offering financial
and professional development prizes, contributing their expertise and
excitement to the event, and supporting UmojaHack Africa 2021 through
their own channels.
“We are incredibly excited about this event spanning over 100 African
universities and helping thousands of African students leverage their
data science and AI skills to solve African problems,” says Chris
Lwanga, Principal Director for Software Partnerships at Microsoft.
“At Microsoft we believe in empowering every organisation and person to do more.”
“Standard Bank is deeply invested in funding and implementing critical
data science skills development programmes, such as Zindi’s UmojaHack
Africa 2021 hackathon, to position Africa as a serious competitor in the world’s rapidly emerging data-driven sector,” says Adrian Vermooten,
Chief Innovation Officer, Standard Bank Group.
“We are delighted to support UmojaHack Africa again, an incredible
initiative close to our hearts. Seeing students from more than 120
universities come together to collaborate on real-world machine learning challenges is truly inspiring,” says Karim Beguir, Co-Founder and CEO
of InstaDeep. “This is, in our opinion, the best way to accelerate AI
growth on the continent. Hackathons like UmojaHack bring us one step
closer to achieving InstaDeep’s mission: building an AI-first world that benefits everyone.”
According to Celina Lee, CEO of Zindi, “UmojaHack Africa has proven to
be a game-changing event, especially when so many young people have been impacted by the global pandemic. This is a chance for students from
across the continent to come together to learn, compete, and have fun.
UmojaHack is about building skills, creating new machine learning
applications to solve problems that really matter, while forging new
connections among the students as well as with industry. We are
incredibly excited to see what the students come up with in just one
weekend.”
About Zindi:
Zindi is a data science competition platform on a mission to build a
thriving data science ecosystem in Africa. We host a community of more
than 24 000 data scientists across Africa and beyond, dedicated to
solving the world’s most pressing challenges through machine learning
and artificial intelligence.
Data scientists of all levels come 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.
Africa’s largest inter-university hackathon brings students together on Zindi for data science, for good
Africa’s largest inter-university hackathon brings students together on Zindi for data science, for good
Africa’s largest inter-university hackathon brings students together on Zindi for data science, for good
Africa’s largest inter-university hackathon brings students together on Zindi for data science, for good
Africa’s largest inter-university hackathon brings students together on Zindi for data science, for good
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