Since the first summer school in 2015, held in Nyeri, Kenya, Data Science Africa (DSA) has grown from a small gathering into a pan-African movement for capacity building in data science and artificial intelligence (AI). In a decade, DSA has reached participants in 34 African countries, convened 1,757 attendees across 13 events, and helped launch a community of data scientists building solutions for some of Africa’s biggest challenges — from health care to climate change, agriculture to education.
Over the years, DSA’s reach has expanded dramatically. Conference attendance peaked in 2021 with 528 participants during an online event, while our 2024 conference held in Nyeri, Kenya, recorded the largest in-person turnout at 296 attendees.
Countries such as Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda consistently lead in participation, but DSA events have drawn applicants from almost every part of the continent. Universities and research institutions remain central to DSA’s community, with Dedan Kimathi University emerging as one of the top feeders of students. The mix of participants has also broadened to include government officials, NGO staff, and private-sector professionals.
DSA doesn’t only run summer schools, but also has a suite of programmes that have become the cornerstones of our work for capacity building. Through fellowships and research grants, for example, including initiatives like the Data Science to Advance Women’s Health fellowship and the Llama Impact Africa grants, DSA supports early-career researchers to tackle real-world African challenges for Africa. Our hackathons, local chapters, and capacity-strengthening activities all help foster a vibrant community.
A critical part of DSA’s evolution has been our effort to close the gender gap in data science. The participation of women in our programmes has steadily improved since DSA’s inception, culminating in the highest-ever female registration in 2021. This shift reflects our targeted outreach and the visible success of female alumni who now serve as mentors and trainers.
But perhaps one of DSA’s most striking achievements is how it brings together participants from varied professional and academic backgrounds. While a large share of attendees come from STEM fields such as computer science, telecommunications, electrical engineering, and bioinformatics, others are from non-technical sectors – including business, project management, and policy. This blend of perspectives is deliberate. DSA’s mission is not confined to one discipline. When you have someone from agriculture sitting next to an engineer or a public-health practitioner, the discussions change, making solutions become more holistic.
DSA’s impact, however, doesn’t end in conference halls. It’s also in what happens after. In 2019, for example, a young computer science graduate, Emmanuael Brempong, attended DSA’s conference in Accra unsure whether a career in AI was even possible in Africa. “People told me, ‘You can’t really do AI here — you have to go abroad,’” he recalls. But after presenting a small project on detecting cocoa diseases using computer vision, he left with something far greater than feedback: a network.
That led him to mentors at Google Research, an AI residency, and eventually a full-time role in Accra, where he now leads projects using machine learning to predict rainfall in regions without radar data. “Before DSA, my research was just me and a few friends experimenting,” he says. “After DSA, I had collaborators and a sense of belonging. I learned that you don’t have to leave Africa to build world-class AI — you can do it right here.”
Brempong’s journey echoes across DSA’s alumni network, proving that access and community can be as career changing and catalytic as funding.
As DSA marks its 10th anniversary, it stands as one of Africa’s top capacity-building efforts in data science and machine learning. DSA exemplifies how African-led initiatives can anchor the continent’s growing presence in global AI research rooted in local needs, and built from the ground up.
For Brempong, the young Ghanaian researcher now building weather models, his story began at DSA — and will continue through DSA.