August-2019

54 / BUSINESS / Artificial intelligence
“Google recently
opened its first
African AI Research
Lab in Accra”
researchers that might have a hard time
getting visas for Western countries, a
problem for African researchers at recent
Canada and US meetings. Another
remedy for this is a homegrown event
called Deep Learning Indaba, which will
have its third annual conference in Nairobi
this month. One of its primary
goals is to build a community and create
opportunities to strengthen the local AI
scene. “AI is booming in Africa, but it’s
booming from the grassroots,” says
Ulrich Paquet, one of Deep Learning
Indaba’s organisers and a research scientist
at DeepMind, a world leader in AI
research that’s based in London.
Investors are taking notice, too.
According to one report, African tech
startups got a record-breaking US$725
million from venture investment funds in
2018, up from US$277 million in 2015.
The report doesn’t stipulate how much is
for AI startups, but the interest is so
great that the continent just got Cortex
Ventures, its first venture capital firm
dedicated to funding AI startups.
AHEAD OF ITS TIME
The technology is so new that much
of its potential is still not well understood,
leaving countries and companies
across the globe figuring out foundational
issues – such as developing best
practices and crafting national policies
– to make sure that AI can flourish.
So far, two African countries have
revealed plans for national strategies:
Kenya and Tunisia. At the beginning of
2018, Kenya’s government announced
that its new task force will come up with
ways to support AI. The task force is
meant to provide recommendations on
how the government can find ways to
leverage these two new technologies in
the next five years and provide roadmaps
for the future. Tunisia announced
that it has a National AI Strategy with
Istock
AI BY THE NUMBERS
• In a survey of African researchers, 97% said
that they believe AI will be a change for the
better.
• There has been a 14-fold increase in the
number of active AI startups across the globe
since 2000.
• In 2018, the second annual Deep Learning
Indaba conference drew over 500 participants
from more than 20 African countries.
the goal to help bring on the emergence
of an AI ecosystem that focusses on
equitable and sustainable development,
as well as job creation.
Besides establishing national policies,
African countries also need to tackle
problems, such as poor Internet connectivity,
limited sources of finance and
frequently inadequate infrastructure,
especially the electricity grid and roads.
Despite those hurdles, however, there are
unique opportunities.
Africa is already developing AI tools
that not only meet the needs of Africans,
but are also suitable for markets abroad.
For example, Makerere University’s
computer science department won
US$1.3 million from Google AI Impact
Challenge 2019 for a project that tracks
and predicts air pollution in major cities.
The project, called AirQo, focusses on
low-cost tools and methods that urban
cities with limited budgets could implement.“These
solutions can be exported
• Google is supporting more than 60 African
startups through its Launchpad Accelerator
Africa programme.
• In total, 16% of African companies are using
machine learning.
• The value of AI in Sub-Saharan Africa is
forecasted to expand 30 fold over the next 7
years to almost US$50 billion.
to the rest of the world,” says Dina
Machuve, a professor at Nelson Mandela
African Institute of Science and
Technology in Tanzania, who organises
Data Science Africa.
Mirroring the way the continent
skipped personal computers by going
directly to mobile, African researchers
could bypass some of the earliest AI
tools and work with more advanced
ones instead, including “edge” devices
that can do AI without relying on cloud
computing
Indeed, at no point in history has
Africa had so much access to technology;
it could bring the continent to new
heights. “This is the first time in history
that we’ve seen this even out,” says
Daniel Mutembesa, a researcher at
Makerere University’s AI Research Lab.
“We’re going to see more of that.”