Pan-African telecommunications group Liquid Telecom is backing newly launched platform Zindi to accelerate the development of data scientists across Africa.

Zindi provides a competitive platform for African data scientists to convene, collaborate and compete to solve the continent’s most pressing challenges through a new data science competition.

“There is growing demand across Africa for data scientists with the technical and analytical skills to understand exponential volumes of data and come up with evidence-based solutions,” Liquid Telecoms says.

The support forms part of Liquid Telecom’s ambition to support the development of data science skills in the region.

Zindi works with companies, nonprofit organisations and government institutions to develop, curate and prepare data-driven challenges.

The social enterprise platform hosts all the tools required for data scientists to compete, share ideas, hone their skills, build their professional profiles and find career opportunities.

The platform launches with three inaugural competitions over the next two to four months, including a text classification challenge, where participants work to automatically classify text content by its relevance to the measurable indicators of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal Number 3, which covers health and wellbeing.

A social media prediction challenge aims to have data scientists create a model to predict the number of retweets a tweet will get on Twitter, while another competition aims to optimise public transport in Nairobi through the creation of a predictive model using traffic data provided by Uber Movement and historic bus ticket sales data from Mobiticket to predict the number of tickets that will be sold for buses into Nairobi.

Total prize money of up to $12 000 is up for grabs in the first set of competitions, with a new competition launched each month.

Liquid Telecom plans to host its own competition on the Zindi platform in the near future, enabling data scientists to analyse its data sets and come up with solutions to better serve customers.

“The Zindi platform offers a dynamic way for data scientists to learn and experiment with large sets of data and we are really excited to be working alongside Zindi on this initiative,” says Liquid Telecom group chief technology and innovation officer Ben Roberts.

“Data science has an enormous role to play in Africa’s digital future – and now is the time to ensure we develop the technical skills that the region needs to excel in the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” he says.

Liquid already provides high-speed Internet access and Azure credits for entrants competing in the DataHack for Financial Inclusion competition, which uses data science to develop new solutions to improve financial inclusion.

It also supports Strathmore Business School, in Nairobi, with its new data analytics centre focused on data-driven research and practices for African businesses.

Liquid Telecom also runs masterclass programmes in data science and Artificial Intelligence for startups in the region.

Through this latest partnership, Liquid Telecom will promote the Zindi platform to its customers and innovation partners, which include leading innovation hubs, academic institutions and startup competitions, Roberts explains.

“From novices to experts, Zindi is bringing together African data scientists to improve their skills and create solutions to real-world problems,” Roberts adds.

“Our partnership with Liquid Telecom will broaden the reach and visibility of the Zindi platform across Africa – enabling data scientists to connect with more peers and access more meaningful data sets,” says Zindi CEO Celina Lee.