More than 150 University of Johannesburg students signed up for the AI for Africa Hackathon Challenge at Vodacom World — the first delivery from the Vodacom, UJ and AWS AI partnership announced in July, and the point at which it reaches undergraduates.
Students worked on AI solutions to education, health, maternal health, community safety, gender-based violence and femicide, youth employment, accessibility and inclusion, water security and agriculture.
Reaching further down
The original partnership centred on master’s students at UJ’s Centre for Applied Data Science. This extends it.
“With this hackathon, which more than 150 students signed up for, this partnership is now also reaching undergraduate and masters students pursuing further education to equip them to be at the cutting edge of developing Africa’s AI capabilities,” said Charlotte Kepadisa, Managing Executive of Big Data, AI and Robotic Process Automation at Vodacom Group.
That matters for the pipeline argument. Postgraduate research produces a small number of highly specialised people. First-year students are where the volume is, and where career direction is still open.
What the students said they learned
The most useful account of the exercise came from a first-year.
“Currently we’re working on a project where we’re developing an app, and my lecturer suggested we take part in the hackathon as we may learn something that can be used in developing our app,” said Badiswa Motsa, 18, studying Business Information Technology. “When we came here we actually thought this is more about coding but there’s actually different levels to this — because you have to think about the business side, the back-end, the front-end, and how is this actually going to help people.”
That last clause is the thing most AI training misses, and she got to it in a weekend.
Dione Gwara, 19, also in first-year Business Information Technology, said he attended because he now had coding experience as a baseline and wanted to showcase it. Makabelo Pitso, a first-year BCom Information Systems student, said she came to understand how hackathons work and “how the industry actually looks like in real life and how we can take what we learn at school into building actual solutions that can be used.”
What sits behind it
Kepadisa framed the broader commitment around people rather than technology. “Building Africa’s AI capabilities requires investment in people as well as technology. Through the AI for Africa Challenge, students apply what they have learned to real-world problems, gaining practical experience and confidence to develop their ideas.”
UJ’s School of Consumer Intelligence and Information Systems, through its Centre for Applied Data Science, supports co-designed learning programmes, postgraduate research and industry mentorship.
The research strand continues alongside. UJ master’s students are working on Vodacom-aligned research into autonomous AI systems that could detect, analyse and respond to cyber threats across telecommunications networks, with further work exploring blockchain-based approaches to digital identity management and identity theft prevention.
AWS provides cloud, data and AI technologies and computing resources for students and researchers to build and test with.
What wasn’t announced
No winners, no projects described, no prizes, and no indication whether any team’s work continues past the event.
That is the measure worth asking for. A hackathon that produces one project still running in six months has done something a weekend of enthusiasm has not.
By Jennifer Onyeagoro, TechAfrica News.
