This year has been one of our most ambitious, and throughout we preserved the pioneering, experimental and service-driven nature of our work and culture. The theme for the Annual Indaba in 2024 was the Wolof phrase Xam Xamlé, which means to gather knowledge and share it, which perfectly captures our charitable and educational mission. Our mission to Strengthen African AI remains necessary and valued, and this impact report shows all the ways in which we execute that mission. We summarise our impacts across 7 impact areas.

We are releasing our annual report that provides a high-level overview of the work of the Indaba over 2023. We share this as a record of the work of the Indaba, as a form of accountability to our beneficiaries and donors, and as a source of lessons for other organisations like ours. Please read and share any feedback with us.

We are proud to announce the winners of the three Indaba Awards: the Kambule Doctoral Award, Kambule Masters Award, and Maathai Impact Award. These awards recognise and celebrate African excellence in machine learning and artificial intelligence. We also release our report summarising the outcomes of this programme and share its key recommendations.

The Deep Learning Indaba is an organisation whose mission is to Strengthen African Machine Learning. This mission is currently executed using three principal programmes, which aim to build communities, create leadership, and recognise excellence in research and innovation across our continent.

The 2nd Deep Learning Indaba hosted Africa’s brightest talent from 35 countries across our continent, and showed that a strong community of researchers and innovators already exists within our continent. We are proud of how strong this community has grown, and the breadth of work that has been done. This report reviews the key outcomes of the 2018 Indaba and our vision for how it will evolve into the future.

The Kambule and Maathai awards represent the third independent programme we run as the Indaba Organisation, and form a key part of our mission to Strengthen African Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. We see our three principal programmes, the Deep Learning Indaba, the IndabaX, and the Kambule and Maathai awards as forming part of an integrated system. The Deep Learning Indaba strengthens African AI communities, the IndabaX creates African leadership in AI, and the annual awards, the programme that is the subject of this report, create spaces of recognition and aspiration, allowing new stories of African AI innovation to be told. This interacting and reinforcing trinity, of community and leadership and recognition, represents the concrete instantiation of our mission.
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These two awards are intended to recognise ability, struggle, effort, and African excellence. The outcomes and key recommendations for enhancing this programme are described in this report.

This report outlines the lessons learnt during our experience of the first Indaba. It outlines our understanding of the current state of African machine learning and AI. We expand on the reasons behind the Indaba’s inception, expand on the format that it took and why, the challenges we see facing students and academics, who form the foundation of an African AI innovation ecosystem, and the challenges of diversity and the ways that these can be addressed in the field.
We hope, and intend, that the Deep Learning Indaba will become an annual event in the African calendar; forming a connected pan-African machine learning community, all working to use this technology for the betterment of our communities and continent. We hope you will gain insight from this report, and use it to make your own contributions to strengthening African machine learning.