What you need to know about data science/AI in Africa in 2019
Africa is probably the last continent most people list or consider when they think of data science/AI research and applications. It is probably the last place Africans themselves point to when it comes to activity in the area.
Thanks to the omnipresence of U.S. tech giants, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft (GAFAM) and their Asian counterparts, Baidou, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi (BATX), and their corresponding humongous data reserves, many people, including many Africans, are anxious about their contribution, relevance, or existence in this space. A writer at The Africa Report recently asked “Can Africa, which does not exist on the “intelligence economy…?”.
And, she is not alone. A quick look at maps of global activity in AI and one would think that Africa is an AI desert.
But how is a continent with the second highest population in the world, second largest landmass, and more importantly, the youngest continent — the continent of the future, with a median age of just 19.4 years — have no representation in the technology and work of the future?
In fact, during the last three and a half years I worked in the tech ecosystem in Ghana, West Africa, I met many young Africans who were deeply concerned about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Future of Work, vis-a-vis AI.
They reasoned that if Ghana and many African countries had not fully industrialized their economies, how could they enter the knowledge economy, let alone access the intilligent one?
For many young Africans, the continent’s development seems like a case in catching an elusive NYC apartment mouse: just as they latch onto the tail of one ideal, three more fast racing developments spring up.
The challenges to harnessing AI’s contribution to development in Africa are visibly immense. The continent faces incredibly financial, human, and infrastructural roadblocks — such as high prohibitive data costs, data gaps, lack of skilled labor, poor regulatory framework —to full participation in the intelligent economy.
Source: Quartz
Yet, dare I say that while they have reason to be concerned, they need not be anxious.
While Africans may not be fully vested in the AI ecosystem, they are making more contributions in this area than you or they think.
According to a recent Forbes article, GAFAM are reliant and banking on Africa’s AI labelling workforce in order to continue to make further advancements in this space.
“Information prepared by data labelers in Africa, the construction workers of the digital world, create an important part of Silicon Valley’s efforts in AI. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and Yahoo use Samasource, a U.S. firm that creates AI training data and information around images, by using some of the poorest tech laborers in Kenya.”
AI data preparation, which was $500M market in 2018 and is expected to hit $1.2B by the end of 2023. Data preparation and engineering tasks represent over 80% of the time consumed in most AI and machine learning projects, and economists struggle to price the market, often far under paying African talent.
Still, perhaps even more interesting and compelling are the contributions of African themselves are making through startups, research institutions, and corporations.
Africans are quickly developing technologies and institutions to contibute to a vibrant AI ecosystem. Knowledge 4 All (K4A) has a chart of 149 AI players in Sub-Saharan market in its Global South Artificial Intelligence Directory. This places makes Africa the top second producer of AI technology in artificial technologies in emerging economies. Among the 149 are 111 African academic institutions, one accelerator/investor, 2 corporates, and 29 start-ups, spaning countries from East, West, and Southern Africa — Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Senegal, Congo, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Uganda.
There are also countless other African AI ecosystem actors who are not accounted for in K4A’s list. They include companies such as InstaDeep, an AI-Enterprise solution, founded by two Algerians in 2014, which recently raised $7 million in Series A funding, and Rancard, a Ghana based tech solutions company building AI powered conversational recommendations.
There are capacity builders, such as Blossom Academy, Kuvora, and BongoHive, who are vigorously developing AI talent for the continent and the global economy. In 2017, I co-founded, TalentsinAfrica, which seeks to use AI to democratize access to work through recommender systems.
Finally, there are a number of AI/Data Science focused events in Africa that build community and help to identify actors and strengthen collaboration in the ecosystem. They include celebrated continent-wide conferences such as Deep Learning Indaba and Data Science Africa. There are also smaller, local community based groups which are spin-offs of global movements such as AI Saturdays Lagos.
If these few examples are enough to make a case then here is one: while urgent calls for “Africans to jump on the AI bandwagon and claim a piece of the pie” are extremely necessary, especially towards advancing strategic and regulatory frameworks by Africa governments in the intelligent economy, they must be balanced with stories about the tremendous contributions and massive inroads Africans are already making in this space.
