DSN Annual Report 2019/2020: Building Africa’s Artificial Intelligence Talents

Africa remains a strategic focus area for exploring how artificial intelligence can drive high-impact development. With a recent report by PwC revealing that artificial intelligence will add $15.7 trillion to the global GDP, Africa can leverage AI opportunities to increase productivity, create new industries, drive consumption and monetize its youthful population as AI talents. Indeed, Africa is well-positioned to leverage new digital technologies to drive large-scale sustainable transformation and competitiveness.

At Data Science Nigeria, our pervasive, inclusive and disruptive learning model is informed by the urgent need to improve the quality of talents in the continent in order to meet future talent needs. Africa harbours nineteen (19) of the world’s twenty (20) youngest countries, with sixty percent (60%) of its population below 25. Its youthful population presents a significant advantage for the continent as the International Financial Corporation (IFC) predicts that 230 million jobs will require digital competence in.

We are motivated by a clear understanding that Africa will be the talent bank of the world in light of the above statistics 2019 and 2020 provided vast opportunities for us to experiment with grassroots learning models. We expanded our oine learning content, grew our learning communities in 17 university campuses and 23 cities, and launched mini learning clusters in many towns to democratize access to AI knowledge. We also explored new methods of hands-on immersion such as project participation, virtual hackathons, learning internship, collaborative research projects, and locally-relevant solution-thinking.