Hosted by Zindi, UmojaHack Africa 2021, the first-ever and largest pan-African inter-university machine learning hackathon for students to take place will take place from 27-28 March 2021, and participating students from across Africa stand the chance to win over $10 000 in prizes.
With data science students from 120 universities in 21 different African countries, the hackathon event will test and develop their data science skills as they will work on real-world challenges.
Celina Lee, CEO of Zindi explains that the hackathon aims to facilitate innovation within the data science sector and encourage young minds to create new solutions to pressing challenges.
“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 real-world problems, and 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.”
Participating students are from various universities such as; University of Cape Town, Carnegie Mellon University Africa, Makerere University, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, and Cairo University, among many others.
UmojaHack Africa 2021
During the hackathon, participating students will be challenged to develop machine learning models to solve one of three challenges. These challenges vary in difficulty and are addressing real data and real-world organisation challenges.
An example of one challenge is the Financial Resilience challenge, this is a logistics challenge provided by Sendy, an African transport startup alongside.
Participants will be judged on their innovative solution based on an internal scoring system developed by Zindi.
The event will be broadcast live on Zindi’s YouTube channel.
