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The First Pan-African Data Science Competition Platform
12 December 2019
Founded in 2018, Zindi is a Cape Town-based startup and the largest African data science competition platform. Zindi works with companies, non-profit organisations and government institutions to develop, curate, and prepare data-driven challenges, to ‘solve Africa’s toughest challenges’.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
First, they identify and define a problem and then they help design a data set that would be needed to build an AI or machine learning solution. Then they post that on their platform and open it up to the community. Zindi has a community of over 8 000 data scientists registered on the platform and they are getting over 100 new registrations every week.
Data scientists would register on Zindi and then register for the competition, which means that they accept the terms and conditions and can then access the data and essentially build machine learning models on the data.
WHY IS CAPE TOWN THE BEST BASE FOR ZINDI?
Cape Town is a great place for a tech or AI startup to be; there’s a vibrant startup scene and the talent pool in Cape Town has been a definite benefit for Zindi. Being close to UCT and Stellenbosch University, there is a really good pipeline of talent in the city.
WHAT ABOUT ZINDI’S PRESENCE IN THE REST OF AFRICA?
Zindi has a network of ambassadors in other countries, so while they don’t have offices, as such, in other countries, they do have a presence across the continent. South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya currently have the most users, but other countries such as Tanzania, Uganda, Tunisia and Senegal are coming up very strongly. But they have data scientists in their network from practically every country in Africa.
Original article compiled by Global Africa
