African AI

Dave Gershgorn, Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Like Silicon Valley, Medium, Sept. 25, 2019:

Deep Learning Indaba has become connective tissue for the African A.I. community — not only the space for the community to meet, but a part of the community itself. The conference forges relationships between researchers on the continent with a clear agenda: to build a vibrant, pan-African tech community — not through reinventing existing technologies, but by creating solutions tailored to the challenges facing the region: sprawling traffic, insurance claim payments, and drought patterns.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and other tech companies underwrite Indaba to a ballpark figure of $300,000, but organizers are still adamant about creating a new, distinct field of research — an industry free from the grip of Silicon Valley.

As Vukosi Marivate, an Indaba organizer and chair of data science at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, told me, “We need to find a way to build African machine learning in our image.”

Foreign investment:

It’s part of a trend in Silicon Valley firms making significant investments across the continent. Google sponsors organizations like Data Science Africa and the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences. In 2018, the company announced its first African research center in Accra, Ghana. Meanwhile, Microsoft and the Bill Gates Foundation have donated nearly $100,000 to Data Science Nigeria, which hopes to train one million Nigerian engineers in the next 10 years.

The appeal of investing in Africa is obvious. 75% of the continent still has no internet access. That’s a challenge for local populations, but also an investment opportunity for international tech firms. Establishing a presence in Africa now means building valuable relationships with users from the very start of their digital lives. A recent investor report indicates Facebook stands to make $2.13 for every user per year in the developing world — up from $.90 in 2015.

Chinese firms have spent years investing heavily in Africa’s tech infrastructure. Huawei installed surveillance cameras around Nairobi on behalf of the Kenyan government, and the company is currently working on large-scale facial recognition surveillance systems around Zimbabwe.

All this foreign investment and data collection raises red flags on a continent scarred by exploitation.

Home grown:

This year’s Indaba conference presented the Maathai Impact award to Bayo Adekanmbi, chief transformation officer of South African telecom MTN, and the founder of Data Science Nigeria (DSN), an organization that has trained tens of thousands of Nigerians to bolster the country’s IT sector. [...]

Adekanmbi wants to train a million Nigerian data scientists in the next 10 years, and as such, he takes the threat of a brain drain very seriously. “It’s a big concern. Talent always moves to the area of highest concentration,” he says. “If we do not build another community here, talent will continue to disperse.” 

One way of keeping talent at home is remote work. Adekanmbi started a program called Data Scientists on Demand, which facilitates engineers in Nigeria to work remotely for companies around the world.