Lacuna Fund’s Post

I had so much fun, learned so much, and connected with so many friends at Deep Learning Indaba at Université Amadou Mahtar MBOW in Dakar, Senegal this week! Thanks to Vukosi Marivate and Dr. Chijioke Okorie, and also Chris Emezue for sharing new thinking about licensing to foster both data sharing and community benefit/sustainability. Amazing to see and hear talks by so many Lacuna Fund partners on African NLP, Climate resilience, and health data. Great to strategize with Leonida Mutuku and International Development Research Centre (IDRC) colleagues, as well as Balthas Seibold and Christian Resch about how to promote the use of ML datasets and facilitate networking among African policy makers, dataset creators, and developers. The Voices of Africa: Building the Infrastructure for African NLP workshop organized by Howard Lakougna stimulated new ideas and conversations about scaling dataset creation, dataset use cases and impact, and data governance. I feel so lucky to work with Albert Kahira, Datawise Africa, who laid out a path forward for compute for Africa.