Winners of Africa’s largest inter-university hackathon 

Hosted by Zindi, UmojaHack Africa 2021, a data science hackathon for students has announced this year’s winners who won over $10 000 in prizes.

The selected winners secured $ 10 000 in prizes

Celina Lee, CEO of Zindi comments on the importance of the hackathon in fostering innovation and much-needed solutions in the space of data science. 

“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 problems that really matter while 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.”

UmojaHack Africa 2021

With over 1000 students from 126 universities across Africa competing, data science students from nine African countries were awarded and over 8500 submissions created to solve real-world machine learning challenges. 

Participating students originated from Algeria, Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Malawi, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. 

Selected participants underwent three different machine learning challenges; a financial resilience prediction challenge, a logistics challenge for African B2B service provider Sendy, and a computational biology challenge using the DeepChain™ platform developed by InstaDeep. 

Winners

Second place in the Sendy Delivery Rider Response Challenge was awarded to Tony Mipawa, a data science student from the University of Dodoma.

Mipawa comments on the award received. 

“I’m very happy with the outcome. My advice is, whenever there is an opportunity to learn, you should take it. Learning is all about passion; whenever there is an opportunity to learn, put your whole effort into it, do it well. Try to learn from anyone you meet. I would like to thank Zindi for what that mentorship programme gave me.”

According to reports, the winning solutions developed by Zindi users will be shared with these organisations and deployed in real-world applications.

Read more: Africa’s largest data science hackathon for students to take place
Read more: SA tech startup aims to promote emotional intelligence among students 

Featured image: David Pupaza via Unsplash