Deep Learning Indaba✓

🪘 Founder’s Series | Episode 1 🪘 “If tomorrow there is a kill switch, will my country continue to operate?” @KateKallot asked African governments that question for two years. Then they started calling her. Kate is the founder and CEO of @AminiTech. She was named to the #TIME100 AI list in 2023 and received a TIME100 Impact Award in 2025. She left NVIDIA to build AI infrastructure from Africa. Live from the sponsor hall at #DLI2026 in Lagos, she tells our media partner @iafrikan: ✨ Why she left NVIDIA for Africa ✨ Is Sovereign AI real, or just a buzzword? ✨ How she raised money as a solo African woman founder ✨ How a 35-person team competes with trillion-dollar Big Tech Founders: stay for her advice on finding investors whose thesis fits your story. ▶️ Watch: Welcome to the inaugural Founder’s Series with @iafrikan, sharing the stories of the people building Africa’s AI future. #DLI2026 #SovereignAI #AfricanAI #Founders

Indaba Insights | Episode 3 🔥 “This is the time for us to help Africa not just consume AI, but actually start to produce AI.” That’s the mission for Dr Prince Abudu, Head of AI Technology at @CassavaTech. He’s an Oxford PhD, a Rhodes Scholar and a former Applied Scientist at Amazon. Live from the sponsor hall at #DLI2026 in Lagos, he tells our media partner @iafrikan: 🔹 What an AI business really is, beyond compute 🔹 How Cassava is bringing AI compute within reach of African budgets 🔹 Why Africa’s AI diaspora should come home 🔹 What Cassava AI is hiring for, and the one question he asks in every interview ▶️ Watch: #DLI2026 #SovereignAI #AfricanAI

Indaba Insights | Episode 2 🔥 What does advising governments on AI actually look like? Prof. Vukosi Marivate (@vukosi), co-founder of the Deep Learning Indaba, @MasakhaneNLP P and @LelapaAI , sat down with our media partner @iafrikan at #DLI2026 in Lagos. He was recently named one of 40 experts on the UN Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, and awarded the Order of Mapungubwe in Silver. He talks about: 🔹 Advising on AI, from the UN to South Africa’s ministries 🔹 Whether governments can keep up with frontier AI 🔹 What a degree is worth in the age of AI 🔹 Moving from brain drain to brain circulation, plus the Indaba 2027 rumour ▶️ Watch: This is the second in our Indaba Insights series with @iafrikan. #DLI2026 #AIGovernance #AfricanAI

Indaba Insights | Episode 1 🔥 How do you bring 842 people from 47 African countries to Lagos? Our General Chairs, Aisha Alaagib (@AishaAlaagib), Albert Njoroge Kahira (@ankahira) and Chinazo Anebelundu (@rKyrian), sat down with our media partner iAfrikan on the second-to-last day of #DLI2026 to talk about: 🔹The visa struggle, and why it matters for Sovereign AI 🔹 What Sovereign AI means, and why it was this year’s theme 🔹 Why the Founder’s Stage: Africa telling its own stories 🔹 The Indaba’s legacy in Nigeria, plus a hint about 2027 ▶️ Watch: This is the first in our Indaba Insights series with @iafrikan. The inaugural Founder’s Series is coming soon. #DeepLearningIndaba #DLI2026 #SovereignAI #AfricanAI

Indaba 2026 Dataset Spotlight | 2 Business law in Africa has a supranational court, and until now its jurisprudence has been difficult to work with at scale. The OHADA CCJA Corpus, submitted by Foutse Yuehgoh, Priyanka N and Patrick Nguetchouessi, is a curated collection of court decisions from the Cour Commune de Justice et d'Arbitrage, the supranational court of the Organisation pour l'Harmonisation en Afrique du Droit des Affaires. What is inside: • 4,059 court decisions in structured form • Coverage spanning 1997 to 2023, more than two decades of jurisprudence • Law harmonised across 17 member states: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo Why it matters: legal NLP research depends on structured access to case law, and that access has been uneven across the continent. A single harmonised body of business law covering 17 countries is an unusual asset. It gives researchers a way to study legal reasoning, citation, retrieval and summarisation in an African context rather than transplanting assumptions from other jurisdictions. Dataset: #Indaba2026 #AfricanAI #Datasets #LegalNLP

Indaba 2026 Dataset Spotlight | 1 Indaba 2026 has wrapped, but the work submitted to it is only getting started. Over the coming weeks we will be featuring the datasets our community brought to Lagos. First up: the Uganda Cultural Context Benchmark (UCCB) from Crane AI Labs (@Crails_Inc), the first comprehensive question and answer dataset built to test how well large language models actually understand Uganda. What is inside: • 1,039 expert-validated question and answer pairs • 24 cultural domains, from folklore and traditional medicine to music, attire, slang, history, religion and economy • Terminology from Luganda, Runyankole, Acholi, Ateso and Lugbara embedded in English-language questions • Validation by 10 Ugandan annotators drawn from all four major regions Why it matters: UCCB has been integrated into the UK AI Safety Institute's Inspect AI framework, making it the first African cultural benchmark inside a sovereign government's AI evaluation infrastructure. Evaluated across five frontier models, scores spread 2.94 points on a 5-point scale. Cultural knowledge is not evenly distributed across model families, and now there is a way to measure that gap instead of guessing at it. Dataset: Code: Inspect AI integration: #DeepLearningIndaba #Indaba2026 #AfricanAI #Datasets

As the energy of #DLI2026 settles, we want to thank the sponsors and partners who made it possible. 🙏 Your support went far beyond the financial. It was hands-on. At the Indaba, you empowered the African AI community by: 🎤 Hosting keynotes and workshops 🚀 Leading career development sessions 💡 Running tutorials and practical labs 🏆 Celebrating and rewarding emerging talent You showed up, sat in the room, and worked alongside the people you came to support. That is what turned a week in Lagos into something the community will carry forward, and it is exactly what #ÌmọWa, Our Knowledge, is meant to mean. Thank you for building this with us. We look forward to what we do next, together. #DLI2026 #ÌmọWa

Today we want to shine a light on one part of the #DLI2026 sponsor community. Our local sponsors. As #DLI2026 draws to a close at Pan-Atlantic University (PAU), we want to name the local partners and sponsors who backed this gathering on the ground in Lagos. Some are institutions that opened their doors. Some are companies building African AI every day. Some are funds betting early on people others have not noticed yet. All of them chose to invest in a community rather than a campaign. Thank you to @dsn_ai_network, @tongstoncompany, @pau_nigeria, @LBSNigeria, Udu Technologies (UduTech), @Sterling_Bankng, @_mdoc , @vp_fund, Askya Investment Partners, @awarritech, @Sagaru_AI, @equalyz_ai, @eTihuku, @curnance, @CassavaTech, @ParasolAfrica24, African Entelligence Lab, @black_in_ai and @AgencyFund . To everyone who has been in the room this week, thank you for making it what it was. #DLI2026 #Indaba2026 #ÌmọWa #sovereignintelligence

The #DLI2026 cultural dinner was everything. 🌍✨ One community, many cultures, coming together to celebrate the continent that powers this movement. From the music to the colours to the showcases from across Africa and beyond, this was a night to remember. Because the Indaba is not just about building AI on our own terms. It is about celebrating who we are while we do it. 🌳 Ìmọ̀ Wa: our knowledge, our intelligence, our culture. #DeepLearningIndaba #SovereignIntelligence #ÌmọWa #AIinAfrica

This is what sovereign intelligence looks like. The #DLI2026 poster session is alive with it, researchers standing beside their work, mid-idea, mid-breakthrough, ready for the next question. Every poster is someone's months of work, someone's late nights, someone's conviction that Africa will not just use AI, but own it, shape it, and build it on its own terms. That is what Ìmọ̀ Wa, our knowledge, our intelligence, is all about. And here in Lagos, that future is not a slogan. It is standing right in front of you, ready to explain its methodology. This is what building looks like. This is what belonging looks like. This is the Indaba. To everyone who presented, who asked, who listened, who showed up: you are sovereign intelligence in motion, and you are the reason this community keeps growing. 🌳 #DLI2026 #DeepLearningIndaba #SovereignIntelligence #ÌmọWa #AIinAfrica

Rethinking AI Benchmarks for African Languages 🗣️📚 This morning, Prof. @vukosi (Chair of @DSFSI_Research at @UPTuks ) delivered an illuminating keynote on "What Do Our Benchmarks Actually Measure? Evaluation Challenges for African Language AI." Prof. Marivate addressed the critical gap between language model advances and evaluation methods—arguing that standard global benchmarks fail to capture the sociotechnical realities, rich dialects, and oral structures of Indigenous languages. Following the keynote, our Research in Africa Days showcased Spotlight Talks and Poster Sessions featuring over 200 research presentations across 4 categories: IndabaX chapters, publication Spotlight papers, general AI research, and African datasets! #DeepLearningIndaba #DLI2026 #AfricanNLP #ResearchInAfrica #DataSovereignty #AIResearch

Workshop Spotlight Series | #DLI2026 Next up in our workshop spotlight series for the Deep Learning Indaba 2026 in Lagos, Nigeria! This one takes on a hard but urgent theme: Reflecting on Online Polarisation and Weaponisation of Social Media in Africa: The Prospect of AI for Peacebuilding. Social media can connect communities, but it can also divide and inflame them. This workshop reflects on online polarisation and the weaponisation of social platforms across Africa, and asks how AI might be turned instead toward peacebuilding. The session brings together a committed team: Seid Muhie Yimam, Technical Lead, University of Hamburg; Bahir Dar University; EthioNLP Usman Naseem, Assistant Professor, Macquarie University Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Google DeepMind Fellow, Imperial College London Adem Chanie Ali, Associate Professor, Bahir Dar University & University of Hamburg Dr. Abinew Ali Ayele, Research Scientist, ICT4D Research Center, Bahir Dar University Tadesse Destaw Belay, PhD student, National Polytechnic Institute Learn more: #DLI2026 #DeepLearningIndaba #AIforPeace #SocialMedia #AIinAfrica

RT @davlanade: It's great honour to present a couple of projects and my journey on building regional LMs for African languages. Thank you @DeepIndaba. You can find the slides on my website Happy to answer further questions via email or at Mila booth today (Aug 4)

"Many low-resource African languages are still not prioritised in how these technologies are built." 🌍 David Adelani @davlanade from @Mila_Quebec took #DLI2026 through lessons from the trenches: AfroXLMR, AfriTeVa V2, and AfriqueLLM, a large language model spanning 20 African languages. The call: build African-centric models for African languages. #DLI2026 #Indaba2026 #ÌmọWa #sovereignintelligence

Faculty Panel Discussion Spotlight | #DLI2026 Next up in our spotlight series for the Deep Learning Indaba 2026 in Lagos, Nigeria, and this time it is a panel! Faculty Panel Discussion: Academia-Industry linkage on the continent, moderated by Frank Dignum and Anthony Ndolo. The gap between the lab and the market is where a lot of good ideas get lost. This panel brings together senior academic voices to discuss how universities and industry across Africa can work together more effectively, turning research into real-world impact. On the panel: Dr. Chinalu Ujah-Ogbuagu, Senior Research Fellow at National Defence College, Nigeria Prof. Nelson Ijumba, International Research and Innovation Programme Manager at Coventry University - Africa Hub Prof. Stephen Gbenga Fashoto, Associate Professor, Data Science, Namibia University of Science and Technology Prof. Narjès BELLAMINE BEN SAOUD, Professor, École Nationale des Sciences de l'Informatique, Tunisia Dr. Ife Adebara, CIFAR AI CHAIR and Assistant Professor, University of Alberta, Canada Bridging the lab and the market, live in Lagos. #DeepLearningIndaba #AfricanAI #SovereignIntelligence #ÌmọWa

Workshop Spotlight Series | #DLI2026 Next up in our workshop spotlight series for the Deep Learning Indaba 2026 in Lagos, Nigeria! This one maps AI onto the land itself: GeoAI for a Climate-Resilient Africa. Geospatial data holds powerful clues for tackling climate change. This workshop explores how GeoAI can support a more climate-resilient Africa, from mapping and monitoring to prediction and planning, turning satellite views into real-world action. The session brings together an expert team: Jonathan Shock, Associate Professor, University of Cape Town Rendani Mbuvha, Associate Professor, University of Witwatersrand; AfriClimate AI Gilles Hacheme, Research Engineer, Microsoft (AI for Good) Shruti Nath, Postdoctoral Researcher, Oxford University; AfriClimate AI Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Research Scientist, Microsoft (AI for Good) Steffen Knoblauch, Habilitation Fellow, Research Scientist, Heidelberg University, AIMS From satellite to solution, and it lands in Lagos. #DLI2026 #DeepLearningIndaba #GeoAI #ClimateResilience #AIinAfrica

Workshop Spotlight Series | #DLI2026 Next up in our workshop spotlight series for the Deep Learning Indaba 2026 in Lagos, Nigeria! This one is hands-on and community-driven: Data, Culture, and Community: An Interactive Exhibition of the AfricaNLP Playbook and Annotation Tool. Language technology for Africa is built by communities, not just models. This interactive exhibition showcases the AfricaNLP Playbook and its annotation tool, and celebrates the data, culture and collaboration that make African NLP possible. The session brings together a dedicated team: Seid Muhie Yimam, Technical Lead, University of Hamburg; Bahir Dar University; EthioNLP Aziza Umer Yibre, PhD Student, Bahir Dar University Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Google DeepMind Fellow, Imperial College London Sukairaj Hafiz Imam, PhD Student, Northwest University Kano Idris Abdulmumin, Research Associate, University of Pretoria Tadesse Destaw Belay, PhD student, National Polytechnic Institute Built by community, for community. See you in Lagos. #DLI2026 #DeepLearningIndaba #AfricaNLP #NLP #AIinAfrica

Workshop Spotlight Series | #DLI2026 Next up in our workshop spotlight series for the Deep Learning Indaba 2026 in Lagos, Nigeria! This one brings AI into the physical world: 4th Workshop on Robotics and Automation in Africa. Robotics is where intelligence meets action. This workshop explores the state of robotics and automation across the continent, from research to real deployment, and what it will take to grow a thriving robotics ecosystem in Africa. The session brings together a hands-on team: Dayo McIntosh, Yateou Inc. Ndivhuwo Makondo, IBM Research Jenalea Rajab, DEI Projects Sicelukwanda Zwane, Kinisi Robotics Elisha Komolafe, AIMS South Africa; University of Cape Town Where intelligence meets action, and Lagos is the stage. #DLI2026 #DeepLearningIndaba #Robotics #Automation #AIinAfrica

Workshop Spotlight Series | #DLI2026 Next up in our workshop spotlight series for the Deep Learning Indaba 2026 in Lagos, Nigeria! This one invites the community to look inward: An Introspective Look at the African AI Landscape. Progress is worth celebrating, but honest reflection is what drives it forward. This workshop takes a candid look at where African AI stands today, its strengths, its gaps and the questions the community needs to keep asking itself. The session brings together a thoughtful team: Chinasa T. Okolo, Policy Lead, Black in AI Ayantola Alayande, Researcher, Global Center on AI Governance Chris Emezue, Founder and Lead, Lanfrica Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Postdoc, AIAL Joy Olusanya, Linguist and NLP Researcher, Center for Low-Resource Languages and Cultures (CLRLC) A moment to reflect before we gather in Lagos. #DLI2026 #DeepLearningIndaba #AfricanAI #AILandscape #AIinAfrica

Workshop Spotlight Series | #DLI2026 Next up in our workshop spotlight series for the Deep Learning Indaba 2026 in Lagos, Nigeria! This one bridges brains and machines: The NeuroAI Workshop. What can neuroscience teach us about building better AI, and what can AI teach us about the brain? This workshop sits at the meeting point of the two fields, exploring how insights from biological intelligence can shape the artificial kind. The session brings together a fascinating team: Jonathan Shock, Associate Professor, University of Cape Town AZA Allsop, Associate Professor, Yale School of Medicine Devon Jarvis, Associate Lecturer, University of Witwatersrand Abdel Mfougouon Njupoun, PhD Candidate, University of Montreal, Mila Quebec AI Institute Emmanuel Olateju, MSc Student, AIMS South Africa & University of Cape Town Lisa Schmors, Postdoc, University of Tübingen Where neuroscience meets AI, and it all converges in Lagos. #DLI2026 #DeepLearningIndaba #NeuroAI #Neuroscience #AIinAfrica

Workshop Spotlight Series | #DLI2026 Next up in our workshop spotlight series for the Deep Learning Indaba 2026 in Lagos, Nigeria! This one pushes past the usual measuring stick: Beyond Benchmarks: Scaling Multi-Turn Participatory AI Evaluations. Benchmarks only tell part of the story. This workshop explores participatory, multi-turn approaches to evaluating AI, bringing real people into the loop to assess systems in ways that reflect how they are actually used. The session brings together a collaborative team: Yann Le Beux, Co-Founder, YUX Design and Kitala AI Oluchi Audu, Senior Design Researcher, YUX Design and Kitala AI Ertony Bashil, Machine Learning Engineer, YUX Design and Kitala AI Oche Ankeli, Machine Learning Engineer, YUX Design and Kitala AI Mercy Muchai, Research Engineer, Microsoft Research Millicent Ochieng, Research Scientist, Microsoft Research People in the loop, insight beyond the benchmark. See you in Lagos. #DLI2026 #DeepLearningIndaba #AIEvaluation #ParticipatoryAI #AIinAfrica