Deep Learning Indaba workshops 2026

We are excited to announce this year’s accepted workshops and sessions. At the Deep learning Indaba, workshops are a way for the community to contribute to the program. They offer a snapshot of what our community is thinking about, what challenges researchers are facing, and where African AI is heading next. While some proposals build on critical conversations that have been growing for years, others introduce entirely new ideas that reflect how quickly our field is evolving. Every theme emerges directly from researchers, students, practitioners, entrepreneurs, educators, and community organizers across the continent.

This year, we received 67 workshop and session proposals. After a highly competitive review process, 22 have been selected for the Deep Learning Indaba 2026 program.

2026 Program Highlights & Formats

The program features a diverse range of formats including call-for-papers sessions, interactive exhibitions, podcasts, and deep-dive panel discussions and community indaba-style conversations, all organized around key themes shaping Sovereign African AI:

1. Navigating the intellectual property frontier of African AI
2. Beyond Benchmarks: Scaling Multi-Turn Participatory AI Evaluations in Health and Education
3. Reflecting on Online Polarization and Weaponization of Social Media in Africa: The Prospect of AI for Peacebuilding
4. Data, Culture, and Community: An Interactive Exhibition of the AfricaNLP Playbook and Annotation Tool 
5. 4th TrustAI Workshop at the Deep Learning Indaba: How Trustworthy Are LLM-as-Judges? Implications for the African Continent
6. An Introspective Look at the African AI Landscape
7. Building Africa's Digital Future: DIGITAfrica AI/ML and Connectivity Blueprints for a Pan-African Research Infrastructure in Digital Sciences
8. How Do We Know AI Works? Lessons from Real Evaluations
9. Whose intelligence? Building Agentic AI in Africa without frontier-model dependency
10. Building Africa's Human Data Infrastructure
11. From Prototype to Impact: Scaling Responsible Climate AI from Africa
12. 4th Workshop on Robotics & Automation in Africa
13. Data Science for Health in Africa
14. GeoAI for a Climate-Resilient Africa
15. Building Red-Teaming Capacity for AI Safety Evaluation in African Contexts: A Hands-On Protocol Workshop
16. AI Engineering in Africa — A Deep-Dive Discussion
17. The NeuroAI Workshop at the Deep Learning Indaba 2026
18. How Do We Know AI Works? Lessons from Real Evaluations
19. Building Africa's Digital Future: DIGITAfrica AI/ML and Connectivity Blueprints for a Pan-African Research Infrastructure in Digital Sciences
20. Quantum Machine Learning For Africa (QML4Africa)
21. Cultivating Sovereign African NLP
22. Wamoja.Africa: Building a pan-African community lowering barriers to entry for participation in collective intelligence and cooperative / democratic AI — through art, research and practice

Event Details

Dates & Times:

August 6 | 08:30 - 16:00

August 7 | 08:30 - 13:30