Morosi is a senior researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute and has flown in from the Mountain Kingdom of Lesotho for the occasion. Dressed in her signature “Mama Africa” ​​hood, she makes her way through the crowded hall.
Moments later, an upbeat set of Nigerian music starts playing over the speakers. Out of nowhere, people pop up and gather around the stage, waving the flags of many African countries. Morosi laughed as he watched. “The community spirit is really strong in Indaba,” she says to applause.
Morosi is one of the founding members of Deep Learning Indaba, which started in 2017 from a 300-person hub in Johannesburg, South Africa. Since then, the program has expanded into a prestigious Pan-African movement with local chapters in 50 countries.
This year, nearly 3,000 people applied to join Indaba. About 1,1300 were accepted. They are mainly from English-speaking African countries, but this year I saw a new arrival from Chad, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Sudan.
Morosi tells me that the main “reward” for many participants is being hired by a tech company or being accepted into a PhD program. In fact, organizations I saw at the event included Microsoft Research’s GoodLab for AI, Google, the MasterCard Foundation, and the Mila-Québec AI Institute. But she hopes more domestic projects within Africa will create opportunities.
That evening, before dinner, we both participated in a panel on AI policy in Africa. Experts discussed AI governance and called for national AI strategy developers to achieve more community engagement. People raised their hands to ask how young Africans can access high-level discussions on AI policy, and whether Africa’s continental AI strategy has been shaped by outsiders. Later, in the conversation, Morosi told me that she would like to see an African Union (such as the African Union-backed labor protection, mineral rights, or safeguards against exploitation).
On the final day of Indaba, I ask Morosi about his dreams for the future of AI in Africa. “I dream of African industries adopting African-built AI products,” she says after a long pause. “We really need to show our work to the world.”
Abdallah Sanani is a science writer based in Senegal who specializes in narrative fiction.