Deep Learning Indaba

🪘 Founder’s Series | Episode 1 🪘

“If tomorrow there is a kill switch, will my country continue to operate?”

@KateKallot asked African governments that question for two years. Then they started calling her.

Kate is the founder and CEO of @AminiTech. She was named to the #TIME100 AI list in 2023 and received a TIME100 Impact Award in 2025. She left NVIDIA to build AI infrastructure from Africa. Live from the sponsor hall at #DLI2026 in Lagos, she tells our media partner @iafrikan:

✨ Why she left NVIDIA for Africa
✨ Is Sovereign AI real, or just a buzzword?
✨ How she raised money as a solo African woman founder
✨ How a 35-person team competes with trillion-dollar Big Tech

Founders: stay for her advice on finding investors whose thesis fits your story.

▶️ Watch: youtu.be/bE7ZB0hHWRM

Welcome to the inaugural Founder’s Series with @iafrikan, sharing the stories of the people building Africa’s AI future.

#DLI2026 #SovereignAI #AfricanAI #Founders

Indaba Insights | Episode 3 🔥

“This is the time for us to help Africa not just consume AI, but actually start to produce AI.”

That’s the mission for Dr Prince Abudu, Head of AI Technology at @CassavaTech. He’s an Oxford PhD, a Rhodes Scholar and a former Applied Scientist at Amazon. Live from the sponsor hall at #DLI2026 in Lagos, he tells our media partner @iafrikan:

🔹 What an AI business really is, beyond compute
🔹 How Cassava is bringing AI compute within reach of African budgets
🔹 Why Africa’s AI diaspora should come home
🔹 What Cassava AI is hiring for, and the one question he asks in every interview

▶️ Watch: youtu.be/SxdptqoFaaA

#DLI2026 #SovereignAI #AfricanAI

Indaba Insights | Episode 2 🔥

What does advising governments on AI actually look like?

Prof. Vukosi Marivate (@vukosi), co-founder of the Deep Learning Indaba, @MasakhaneNLP P and @LelapaAI , sat down with our media partner @iafrikan at #DLI2026 in Lagos. He was recently named one of 40 experts on the UN Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, and awarded the Order of Mapungubwe in Silver. He talks about:

🔹 Advising on AI, from the UN to South Africa’s ministries
🔹 Whether governments can keep up with frontier AI
🔹 What a degree is worth in the age of AI
🔹 Moving from brain drain to brain circulation, plus the Indaba 2027 rumour

▶️ Watch: youtu.be/c9yquq1absw

This is the second in our Indaba Insights series with @iafrikan.

#DLI2026 #AIGovernance #AfricanAI

Indaba Insights | Episode 1 🔥

How do you bring 842 people from 47 African countries to Lagos?

Our General Chairs, Aisha Alaagib (@AishaAlaagib), Albert Njoroge Kahira (@ankahira) and Chinazo Anebelundu (@rKyrian), sat down with our media partner iAfrikan on the second-to-last day of #DLI2026 to talk about:

🔹The visa struggle, and why it matters for Sovereign AI
🔹 What Sovereign AI means, and why it was this year’s theme
🔹 Why the Founder’s Stage: Africa telling its own stories
🔹 The Indaba’s legacy in Nigeria, plus a hint about 2027

▶️ Watch: youtube.com/watch?v=q2xLRs…

This is the first in our Indaba Insights series with @iafrikan. The inaugural Founder’s Series is coming soon.

#DeepLearningIndaba #DLI2026 #SovereignAI #AfricanAI

Indaba 2026 Dataset Spotlight | 2

Business law in Africa has a supranational court, and until now its jurisprudence has been difficult to work with at scale.

The OHADA CCJA Corpus, submitted by Foutse Yuehgoh, Priyanka N and Patrick Nguetchouessi, is a curated collection of court decisions from the Cour Commune de Justice et d'Arbitrage, the supranational court of the Organisation pour l'Harmonisation en Afrique du Droit des Affaires.

What is inside:
• 4,059 court decisions in structured form
• Coverage spanning 1997 to 2023, more than two decades of jurisprudence
• Law harmonised across 17 member states: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo

Why it matters: legal NLP research depends on structured access to case law, and that access has been uneven across the continent. A single harmonised body of business law covering 17 countries is an unusual asset. It gives researchers a way to study legal reasoning, citation, retrieval and summarisation in an African context rather than transplanting assumptions from other jurisdictions.

Dataset: huggingface.co/datasets/Maath…

#Indaba2026 #AfricanAI #Datasets #LegalNLP