It’s late August in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, and people are filling a large hall at one of Africa’s biggest gatherings of minds in AI and machine learning. The room is draped in white curtains, and a giant screen blinks with videos created with generative AI. A classic East African folk song by the Tanzanian singer Saida Karoli plays loudly on the speakers.
Friends greet each other as waiters serve arrowroot crisps and sugary mocktails. A man and a woman wearing leopard skins atop their clothes sip beer and chat; many women are in handwoven Ethiopian garb with red, yellow, and green embroidery. The crowd teems with life. “The best thing about the Indaba is always the parties,” computer scientist Nyalleng Moorosi tells me. Indaba means “gathering” in Zulu, and Deep Learning Indaba, where we’re meeting, is an annual AI conference where Africans present their research and technologies they’ve built.
Moorosi is a senior researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute and has dropped in for the occasion from the mountain kingdom of Lesotho. Dressed in her signature “Mama Africa” headwrap, she makes her way through the crowded hall.
Moments later, a cheerful set of Nigerian music begins to play over the speakers. Spontaneously, people pop up and gather around the stage, waving flags of many African nations. Moorosi laughs as she watches. “The vibe at the Indaba—the community spirit—is really strong,” she says, clapping.
Moorosi is one of the founding members of the Deep Learning Indaba, which began in 2017 from a nucleus of 300 people gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa. Since then, the event has expanded into a prestigious pan-African movement with local chapters in 50 countries.
This year, nearly 3,000 people applied to join the Indaba; about 1,300 were accepted. They hail primarily from English-speaking African countries, but this year I noticed a new influx from Chad, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Sudan.
Moorosi tells me that the main “prize” for many attendees is to be hired by a tech company or accepted into a PhD program. Indeed, the organizations I’ve seen at the event include Microsoft Research’s AI for Good Lab, Google, the Mastercard Foundation, and the Mila–Quebec AI Institute. But she hopes to see more homegrown ventures create opportunities within Africa.
That evening, before the dinner, we’d both attended a panel on AI policy in Africa. Experts discussed AI governance and called for those developing national AI strategies to seek more community engagement. People raised their hands to ask how young Africans could access high-level discussions on AI policy, and whether Africa’s continental AI strategy was being shaped by outsiders. Later, in conversation, Moorosi told me she’d like to see more African priorities (such as African Union–backed labor protections, mineral rights, or safeguards against exploitation) reflected in such strategies.
On the last day of the Indaba, I ask Moorosi about her dreams for the future of AI in Africa. “I dream of African industries adopting African-built AI products,” she says, after a long moment. “We really need to show our work to the world.”
Abdullahi Tsanni is a science writer based in Senegal who specializes in narrative features.
