<strong>GeoAI for a Sustainable Future in Africa</strong>

by siobhan | Oct 20, 2024 | Blog

6th September, 2024

Dakar, Senegal

The GeoAI for a Sustainable Future in Africa workshop was organised by the GeoAI-Africa community in a collaborative spirit among representatives from diverse organisations such as Microsoft AI for Good Lab, Google Research, and IBM Research. The workshop brought together students, experts, innovators, and enthusiasts to explore the transformative potential of geospatial AI in Africa. The event featured insightful presentations, engaging discussions, and a collaborative hackathon, all aimed at driving sustainable progress on the continent. In this blog post, we’ll share an overview of these activities. 

Our Keynote speakers

The first keynote by Dr. Olubayo Adekanmbi, the Founder and CEO of Data Science Nigeria, shared practical applications of geospatial AI technologies across diverse sectors both in Nigeria and beyond. His talk emphasised the critical role of data science in addressing Africa's unique challenges and opportunities, sparking a lively Q&A session that delved deeper into the practical applications of his insights. Our second keynote speaker, Zaheed Gaffoor, a research scientist at IBM Research Africa, shared the tremendous work his team has done to build Earth observation foundational models to tackle a wide variety of climate-related challenges.

Our Hackathon

A participatory hackathon titled “Indaba 2024: Vision-LLMs for Satellite Labeling in Africa” was a standout feature of the workshop (please note the hackathon will be made public at a later date). Participants collaborated on leveraging large language models for satellite data labeling. This initiative aims to address the shortage of labeled satellite data in Africa, which limits critical applications such as land use mapping, disaster impact assessment, and agricultural monitoring. By generating weak labels for satellite images, participants are helping to tackle these challenges by scaling the labeling process and reducing the costs of manual labeling.

Our panel discussion

The workshop culminated in a panel discussion on driving sustainable progress in Africa through geospatial AI capabilities. The panelists, moderated by Sekou Remy, included Dr. Olubayo Adekanmbi, Jackline Tum, Zaheed Gaffoor, Akram Zaytar, Aisha Alaagib, and William Ogallo. The panelists underlined the critical role geospatial AI technologies could play, particularly in mitigating the adverse impacts of climate change, tackling food security, and more broadly, achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They also stressed the importance of collaboration, innovation, and investment in building impactful GeoAI solutions at scale.

Conclusion

Overall, the workshop was a testament to the power of collective effort and innovation in harnessing geospatial AI for sustainable development in Africa. We look forward to building on the momentum generated and translating the insights gained into tangible impacts.

Next steps

The GeoAI-Africa community is thrilled to invite passionate individuals to join us in an exciting journey of collaboration, learning, and mentorship around transformative geospatial projects for Africa and the Global South! Whether you're an innovator, a learner, or a mentor, a decision maker, there's a place for you here. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity—fill out this form and start your adventure with us today!

For more information, you are welcome to contact the team via email: geoai-africa@googlegroups.com

Pictures

Caption: Group picture of the workshop attendees

Caption: Sabrina Amrouche giving the AI for Social Good book to Jackline Tum.

Caption: Gilles Quentin Hacheme presenting the GeoAI community.

Caption: Aisha Alaagib presenting the GeoAI community.

Caption: Gilles Quentin Hacheme introducing the GeoAI for a Sustainable Future in Africa workshop.

Caption: Dr. Olubayo Adekanmbi giving his keynote. 

Caption: Akram Zaytar presenting the Hackathon.

Caption: Panel discussion. From left to right: Akram Zaytar, William Ogallo, Jackline Tum, Zaheed Gaffoor, Aisha Alaagib. 

Caption: Gilles Quentin Hacheme offering the AI for Social Good book to Dr. Olubayo Adekanmbi.

Caption: Sabrina Amrouche giving the AI for Social Good book to Akram Zaytar.

Cheikh Anta Diop Award

The Cheikh Anta Diop Award recognises, encourages, and celebrates excellence in research, teaching, and community service by early- to mid-career academics and researchers at African universities in any area of artificial intelligence, as well as computational and statistical sciences. Its recipients are those who uphold Cheikh Anta Diop’s legacy as a multidisciplinary scientist and visionary intellectual.

The DLI 2026 Cheikh Anta Diop Award is awarded to:

Winner: Prof Omneya Attallah 

Country: Egypt

Affiliation: Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTMT)

Essence of the Award: Prof. Omneya Attallah says that this award reminds her that every late night, sacrifice, and challenge she has faced as a working mother and African researcher has been worthwhile. It proves that perseverance truly pays off.

Professor Omneya Attallah is recognised for a career that integrates research excellence, teaching, and community service into a single mission. At AASTMT, she has built a research programme spanning breast cancer detection, paediatric epilepsy diagnosis, wearable biosensing, explainable AI, and CanSense, a breathomics AI system for non-invasive breast cancer screening developed on locally collected Egyptian clinical data in partnership with Egyptian clinicians. As a teacher she designed the curriculum for a new undergraduate Biomedical Engineering programme. She has supervised 13 postgraduate researchers to completion, the majority of them women. Through HERBioLab, WeBios, and her IEEE and editorial activities, she has built laboratories, curricula, training pathways, and partnerships that are shaping the next generation of African biomedical AI researchers

Wangari Maathai Impact Award

The Wangari Maathai Impact Award recognises and celebrates work by African innovators, thinkers, and advocates who demonstrate impactful work, including, but not limited to, technical, societal, environmental, and economic domains, around machine learning and artificial intelligence. This award reinforces the legacy of Wangari Maathai by acknowledging the capacity of individuals to be a positive force for change: by recognising ideas and initiatives that demonstrate that each of us, no matter how small, can make a difference.

The DLI 2026 Wangari Maathai Impact Award is awarded to:

Winner: Dr Hellina Hailu Nigatu

Country: Ethiopia

Affiliation: Artificial Intelligence Accountability Lab (AIAL) at Trinity College Dublin

Essence of the Award: Dr Hellina Hailu Nigatu says that having read Wangari Maathai's autobiography, Unbowed, it is a personal privilege to be recognized with an award in her name. She wants to give gratitude to her mentees on the project who carried the majority of the work. This recognition is as much, if not more, a fruit of their effort and hard work. She hopes this will also inspire more grassroots ventures in the African AI landscape that foster meaningful community engagement and participation.

Dr Hellina Hailu Nigatu is recognised for her work addressing gender bias in machine translation across three Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Afan Oromo, and Tigrinya. Rather than adapting English benchmarks, she built evaluation frameworks and datasets directly within African languages, preserving cultural nuances that translation from English cannot capture. Key to this work is the Yeswa Stories dataset, centered on African women's narratives and lived experiences. Seven Ethiopian female students participated as paid researchers, benefiting from funding, compute access, and substantive mentorship throughout. The project produced open-release benchmark datasets now available to the broader African NLP community. Her mentorship has been described by those she supervised as transformative, not nominal.

The DLI 2026 Wangari Maathai Impact Award runner-up is: 

Runner-up: Abdel-aziz Harane Abounounou 

Country: Chad

Affiliation: Chad AI Network

Essence of the Award: Abdel-aziz Harane says that he is deeply honored by this award. This recognition reflects his constant obsession: solving Chad's real problems through AI and software engineering. It renews his commitment to the Chad AI Network's mission of sustainable, locally driven transformation.

Abdel-aziz Harane Abounounou is recognised for his work building the first natural language processing tools for Chad's indigenous languages, a country with 123 languages yet only two represented in existing digital tools. Rather than waiting for a foreign lab to take interest, he set out to build the entire pipeline himself, working directly with the communities who speak these languages. The Kalam-na project anchors this work, collecting audio and text data across 16 dialects of the Sara language family. Native speakers contribute their own voices through Kalam-na Voice, a platform built to remove technical barriers to participation. The project has gathered over 68,000 transcribed audio clips and 72,000 aligned texts, laying the groundwork for open ASR, TTS, and MT models. He also founded the Chad AI Network, now over 200 members strong, and ran two editions of IndabaX Chad. This work reaches an estimated 4 million speakers of Chadian languages currently shut out of the digital world.

Thamsanqa Kambule Doctoral Award

The Thamsanqa Kambule Doctoral Award recognises, encourages, and celebrates excellence in research and writing by doctoral candidates at African universities in any area of computational and statistical sciences. Its recipients are those who uphold Thamsanqa Kambule’s legacy as a defender of learning, a seeker of knowledge, and an activist for equality.

The DLI 2026 Thamsanqa Kambule Doctoral Award is awarded to:

Winner: Dr Everlyn Chimoto 

Country: Kenya

Affiliation: Lelapa AI & Riara University

Essence of the Award: “Receiving this award is deeply meaningful because it recognises not only the years of work invested in this thesis, but also the support of my supervisor, collaborators, family, and the African NLP community that has continually inspired and challenged me. To me, it also recognises the importance of pursuing research motivated by the needs of underrepresented language communities. I believe this work demonstrates that data-centric approaches can make meaningful progress in low-resource settings while remaining relevant to many other machine learning problems. I am encouraged to continue pursuing research that advances knowledge while creating opportunities for more languages and more people to participate in language technology,” says Dr Everlyn Chimoto.

Dr Everlyn Chimoto is recognised for a doctoral thesis on sentence alignment for the Marama dialect of Luhya, CAT data pruning which achieves 92% of full-data performance at 50% of the data with no additional compute cost, GrammaMT which delivers over 12 BLEU point improvements for endangered languages from as few as 21 grammatical examples, and COMET-QE active learning for efficient data selection. Together these form a framework immediately usable by African NLP practitioners working under real compute and data constraints. Her work is centred on improving model performance to make AI systems more inclusive for African language communities.

The DLI 2026 Thamsanqa Kambule Doctoral Award runner-up is:

Runner-up: Dr Devon Jarvis 

Country: South Africa

Affiliation: University of the Witwatersrand

Essence of the Award: “I started learning ML while volunteering at the Indaba in 2017. To be recognised nine years later is gratifying and reflects the impact this community has had on my career,” says Dr Devon Jarvis.

Dr Devon Jarvis is recognised for his doctoral work developing a theoretical framework for controlled semantic cognition using deep and nonlinear neural networks to explain how the human brain flexibly applies learned semantic concepts to new contexts. Rather than treating machine learning purely as an engineering tool, he built tractable theoretical models that shed light on the principles of human cognition itself. His dissertation extends deep linear network theory to explain systematic generalisation, introduces a novel framework (the Rectified Linear Network) to model ReLU network training dynamics, and shows that these networks can capture all six classical properties of controlled semantic cognition while still falling short of systematic generalisation. He then proposes a meta-learning model, the Meta-GDLN, as a path toward closing that gap. He has since remained on the continent to establish the CAandL Lab, one of Africa's first computational neuroscience labs.

Grace Alele-Williams Masters Award

The Grace Alele-Williams Masters Award recognises and celebrates excellence in research and writing by master's candidates at African universities in any area of computational and statistical sciences. Its recipients are those who uphold Grace Alele-Williams’ legacy as a defender of learning, champion of academic excellence, and activist for access to education.

The DLI 2026 Grace Alele-Williams Masters Award is awarded to:

Winner: Akinbobola Adegboyega

Country: Nigeria

Affiliation: Olabisi Onabanjo University

Essence of the Award: According to Akinbobola Adegboyega, “The Alele-Williams Award is a reminder that hard work, curiosity, and dedication matter, and it inspires me to keep making meaningful contributions for societal benefit.”

Akinbobola Adegboyega is recognised for a Master's thesis that introduces affective fidelity as a new evaluation lens for machine translation in low-resource tonal languages, reframing emotion as a core measure of translation faithfulness rather than a secondary concern. His work targets Yorùbá, a language representing just 0.008% of Common Crawl training data. He produced a culturally validated bilingual emotion dataset of over 200 annotated paragraph pairs verified by native speakers, created a reproducible benchmarking framework evaluating four major language models, and identified six distinct failure modes specific to tonal low-resource language translation. The dataset has been released openly, contributing usable infrastructure to the African NLP community.

The DLI 2026 Grace Alele-Williams Masters Award runner-up is:

Runner-up: Imen Habibi 

Country: Tunisia

Affiliation: LARIA, ENSI, University of Manouba, Tunisia

Essence of the Award: “This recognition is the reward for five years of dedication and perseverance. It honors my supervisors' support and inspires me to continue pursuing research with confidence,” says Imen Habibi.

Imen Habibi is recognised for her master's thesis designing a drone-based inspection system that integrates optimized UAV path planning with AI-powered imaging for industrial applications. She developed spiral and zigzag trajectory strategies for nuclear facility inspection (validated through 2D and 3D simulations) alongside a CNN-based anomaly detection pipeline for PV solar panels achieving 91% accuracy. Her work bridges trajectory optimization and intelligent image analysis into a unified system applied to real industrial use cases, improving inspection reliability, precision, and efficiency.