African startup launches a challenge to data scientists to stop the spread of Covid19

The crowd solving startup called Zindi, established in South Africa in 2018, has been building a database of data scientists across Africa. Zindi’s aim is to aggregate pressing private or public-sector challenges and match the solution seekers to problem solvers.

The founders of the startup, Celina Lee, Megan Yates and Ghanaian Ekow Duker, did not imagine Covid19 but, when they created Zindi, they thought of leveraging on Africa’s data science expertise to solve problems around a complex health crisis. “As an online platform, Zindi is well-positioned to mobilize data scientists at scale, across Africa and around the world, from the safety of their homes,” Lee said.

On the platform, there are 12,000 registered data scientists that use AI and machine learning to tackle complex problems. Zindi launched a challenge focused on stemming the spread and havoc Covid19. The challenge is sponsored by Artificial Intelligence for Development, asks scientists to create models that can use data to predict the global spread of Covid19 over the next three months.

Lee believes the startup’s competitions can produce solutions that nations in Africa could tap as the Covid19 spreads. Starting in April, Zindi will launch six-weekend hackathons focused on Covid19, to which all data scientists registered on the platform can participate.

“The one that’s open right now should hopefully go into informing governments to be able to anticipate the spread of the disease and to more accurately predict the high-risk areas in a country,” Lee said.

Adapted from: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/26/zindi-taps-12000-african-data-scientis...