The 2025 Bootcamp marked another defining milestone in DSN’s bold mission to train one million AI talents within ten years and position Africa as a global hub for inclusive and sustainable technological innovation.

This year’s edition attracted over 32,000 applications from across Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, a record that underscores the growing national appetite for AI capacity development and the trust DSN has earned as the continent’s foremost AI learning and research non-profit.

Through a rigorous multi-stage process that assessed technical aptitude, problem-solving potential, and collaborative mindset, only 150 of the most outstanding learners emerged as finalists and were invited to the fully residential, all-expenses-paid Bootcamp hosted at the University of Lagos.

The Bootcamp’s curriculum was designed to deliver an end-to-end learning experience that merged technical depth with social impact. Participants explored cutting-edge themes such as Generative and Agentic AI, Geospatial Intelligence, Digital Public Infrastructure, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Responsible AI.

The training followed a structured model that progressed from foundational sessions to advanced project development, enabling participants to transition quickly from concept to deployable prototypes with real-world relevance.

The approach reflected DSN’s enduring philosophy of “learning, building, and sharing,” ensuring that every participant not only gained world-class knowledge but also understood how to apply it toward solving Africa’s most pressing challenges.

The Bootcamp was powered by a strong coalition of global partners and industry leaders, including Microsoft, Meta, MTN, Google DeepMind, Boaz Integrated Energy, Hyperspace, NVIDIA, NitHub, EqualyzAI, TechCabal, Askya Investment, the Fintech Association of Nigeria, and the University of Lagos. These organizations brought together expertise, resources, and mentorship, making the programme a world-class experience.

In all, 32 renowned experts from across the globe facilitated technical and strategy sessions, drawing from institutions such as the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Mastercard Foundation, Access Holdings Plc, Interswitch Group, MTN, PwC, PIC, ARM, the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, WorldPop, and the University of Southampton.

Among the high points of the Bootcamp were the masterclasses delivered by some of the most respected voices in technology and development.

Dr. Uyi Stewart, Chief Data and Technology Officer at Data.org, shared an inspiring keynote on “AI for Inclusive Growth,” emphasizing how data and technology can accelerate social progress.

Olubunmi Okunowo and Toyosi Odukoya led an engaging session on how open-source frameworks and Digital Public Infrastructure can enable national development and inclusive service delivery.

Dr. Chris Nnanatu’s presentation on “Powering Africa’s Growth with Location Intelligence” highlighted the transformative power of geospatial data for economic and environmental planning.

Collectively, these sessions underscored the thematic focus of this year’s Bootcamp, that Africa’s future in AI must be both inclusive and indigenous, built on solutions that reflect local realities and global best practices.

Beyond classroom learning, the participants participated in a high-impact Hackathon designed to convert theory into tangible solutions.

Working in multidisciplinary teams, the learners tackled real-world problems across healthcare, agriculture, financial inclusion, and public service delivery sectors.

One of the most inspiring moments came from EqualyzAI, a DSN-incubated startup, which showcased its pioneering work on localizing Small Language Models (SLMs) for African languages.

The demonstration aligned with DSN’s ongoing work in AI for social good and reflected the broader vision of building equitable digital futures for Africa’s linguistically diverse population.

The Bootcamp culminated in an awards ceremony celebrating excellence, creativity, and community spirit.

The DSN Community at the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA) emerged as the AI School of the Year, a recognition sponsored by Boaz Integrated Energy and Hyperspace, and received a $1,000 grant to establish a mini AI library that will serve as a lasting legacy of continuous learning on campus.

Individual awards also highlighted exceptional performance: the Mr. & Ms. Algorithm Awards, sponsored by Microsoft, celebrated participants who demonstrated commitment and core values of DSN Community; Best Academic Poster, sponsored by Google DeepMind; Best Hackathon Project, sponsored by MTN Foundation; and Best Project Participation, also supported by Microsoft, all rewarded brilliance and consistency with tiered cash prizes.

In addition, every participant received a Microsoft-sponsored certification voucher, a tangible step that enhances employability and global recognition in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Throughout the Bootcamp, industry partners played a visible role not only as sponsors but as co-educators, mentors, and advocates for inclusive innovation.

Their contributions underscored a shared belief that Africa’s competitiveness in the global digital economy depends on collective investment in human capital and home-grown innovation.

The partnership between DSN and Microsoft continued to provide the foundational bridge between learning and opportunity, through advanced skilling, access to certification, and exposure to real-world AI applications.

In his closing remarks, Dr. Olubayo Adekanmbi, Data Science Nigeria’s founder and chief executive officer, reflected on the transformative journey of the AI Bootcamp since its inception.

He described the 2025 edition as reaffirming the belief that Africa’s future will not be imported but intelligently built by its people.

He urged participants to act as ambassadors of knowledge, extend the mentorship culture, and replicate the Bootcamp’s impact within their local communities.

“We have built not just coders but catalysts, people who will use AI to solve Africa’s most pressing challenges,” he said. “As you have freely received, freely give.”

The 8th Data Science Nigeria AI Bootcamp is a powerful testament to the potential of strategic collaboration, purposeful learning, and inclusive access.

It represents a generation of young innovators equipped with technical competence and a shared vision of using AI as a tool for national transformation and global relevance.

As the participants return to their campuses, startups, and communities, they carry the collective energy of an ecosystem determined to make AI work for all, ensuring that Africa’s intelligence revolution remains open, inclusive, and transformative.

In fact, the pioneering African-centric AI start-up, officially unveiled its solutions today with a bold mission: to build AI solutions that solve real-world problems in emerging markets using hyperlocal multimodal datasets, created in collaboration with native language speakers, to build localized models for agentic AI innovations.

The company aims to make AI truly understand African contexts and speak its languages, ensuring AI innovations are accessible, inclusive, and impactful for the communities that need them most.

Founded by award-winning experts, Dr. Olubayo Adekanmbi and Dr. Ife Adebara, EqualyzAI is committed to ensuring African languages, cultures, and contexts are central to the global AI evolution.

Dr. Adekanmbi brings extensive experience as a C-level executive at MTN and Airtel Africa UK Limited, where he led innovations, analytics and strategy, serving over 250 million customers across over 20 countries on the continent.

He is also a Global Grand Challenge winner for his work on Large Language Models (LLMs) and has played a pivotal role in establishing Data Science Nigeria, Africa’s leading AI learning, research, and solution delivery network.

Dr. Adebara is a globally recognized AI researcher, specializing in Deep Learning, Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a PhD from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada.

She is a UNESCO IRCAI Top 10 Outstanding Global AI Solutions awardee for her work on AfroLID, Serengeti and Cheetah, groundbreaking models for language identification and natural language understanding across 517 African languages.

The unveiling event, held on Friday, February 21, 2025, in celebration of the International Mother Language Day, brought together journalists, industry leaders, and AI enthusiasts to showcase EqualyzAI’s groundbreaking innovations.

The event highlighted the organization’s commitment to promoting linguistic diversity, cultural heritage, and inclusive AI development. Through its unique approach of collaborating with native language speakers, the company is building agentic AI solutions capable of understanding, processing, and generating responses in many African languages.

Speaking at the launch event held at Data Science Nigeria hub, Yaba, Dr. Adekanmbi said:

“Our mission is to ensure that AI speaks our languages, understands our contexts in text, speeches, images and videos, and solves our unique challenges. This is not just about technology; it’s about empowerment and inclusion. At EqualyzAI, we are bridging this gap by creating AI solutions trained on African realities, ensuring that no one is left behind.”

Dr. Adebara further emphasized the importance of localized AI solutions, stating:

“Language is a gateway to knowledge, opportunity, and identity. By building AI that understands and speaks African languages, we are preserving our cultural heritage and creating tools that can transform lives. Africa is home to over 2,000 languages, yet most AI models struggle to understand even a fraction of them. Our goal is to change this by developing AI that speaks and understands Africa’s languages, unlocking new opportunities for education, business, and social impact.”

At the event, EqualyzAI demonstrated its cutting-edge AI solutions designed to address critical challenges in Africa while promoting linguistic diversity.

Key innovations include:

1. DataCollect: A platform designed to collect hyperlocal datasets needed to build AI solutions that speak many African languages, ensuring inclusivity and representation.
2. AfroSLM 1.0: A Small Language Model (SLM) optimized to improve financial literacy in Yoruba and Hausa, empowering users with accessible financial education in their native languages.
3. uLearn: An LLM-powered tool for teachers to generate lesson plans, notes, and quizzes in English and local languages, revolutionizing education delivery across Africa.

Additionally, EqualyzAI shared its recent white paper, titled “How Small Language Models (SLMs) Are Revolutionizing Localized AI Innovations for Social Good in Africa.”

The paper explores the transformative potential of SLMs in addressing Africa’s unique challenges and advancing AI accessibility.

EqualyzAI is not just building AI models—it is building a movement to democratize AI and make its possibilities accessible to all Africans.

By investing in hyperlocal AI innovations, the company aims to create solutions that empower communities, drive economic growth, and preserve Africa’s linguistic heritage.

Picture a world where misinformation is quickly and accurately addressed, ensuring that the public has access to reliable information.

These visions are becoming a reality thanks to Meta’s groundbreaking Llama technology and the innovators harnessing its power to drive change in Africa.

Recent breakthroughs in AI, and generative AI in particular, have captured the public’s imagination and demonstrated what those developing these technologies have long known — they have the potential to help people do incredible things, create a new era of economic and social opportunities, and give individuals, creators, and businesses new ways to express themselves and connect with people.

As part of Meta’s commitment to open science, the company announced the release of Llama (Large Language Model Meta AI) in February 2023, a cutting-edge foundational large language model designed to advance research in AI.

Like other large language models, Llama works by taking a sequence of words as input and predicting the next word to recursively generate text.

Following this initial release, Meta introduced Llama 2, Llama 3, Llama 3.1 and the most recent iteration, Llama 3.2.

Over the past few years, Meta’s Llama models have demonstrated new capabilities, including generating creative text, solving mathematical theorems, predicting protein structures and answering reading comprehension questions.

The two largest models of the Llama 3.2 collection, 11B and 90B, support image reasoning use cases, such as document-level understanding including charts and graphs, captioning of images, and visual grounding tasks such as directionally pinpointing objects in images based on natural language descriptions.

The lightweight 1B and 3B models are also highly capable with multilingual text generation and tool calling abilities.

With more than 400 million downloads, companies are using Llama to create localised educational content, summarise video calls, and provide medical information in low-resource settings.

These projects highlight the significant potential AI has to benefit billions of people worldwide.

As technology continues to evolve, innovative minds across Africa are leveraging its power to address pressing social challenges and drive meaningful change.

Two such innovators, Dr. Olubayo (Bayo) Adekanmbi and Olasupo Abideen Opeyemi, are at the forefront of this movement, using Meta’s Llama technology to create solutions that have the potential to transform lives in health, education, finance and digital governance.

Dr. Olubayo (Bayo) Adekanmbi: Leveraging Llama 2 for Social Good

Olubayo Adekanmbi, the CEO of Data Science Nigeria (now known as equalyzAI), is a leading figure in AI research and development.

He’s passionate about using AI to empower individuals and bridge the digital divide. EqualyzAI is building a unique hyperlocal multimodal dataset, models and APIs that unlock the potential of generative AI for native dialect speakers in Africa.

They focus on creating Large Language Models (LLMs) for African languages that can be fine-tuned in response to specific health, finance, agriculture and education needs.

One such innovation is a personalised learning platform, ULearn, built with Llama 2. This platform allows students, teachers and even parents to generate multimedia learning content for elementary science that caters to students’ individual needs, enhancing their learning experience and engagement. Imagine personalised lesson plans, flashcards and animated videos tailored to the needs of every student!

This revolutionary approach transforms education from a one-size-fits-all model to a personalised learning journey.

Additionally, equalyzAI empowers market women with financial literacy tools, fostering economic growth and community stability. Their AI-driven healthcare solutions also improve accessibility and coverage, especially in underserved regions.

Olasupo Abideen Opeyemi: Revolutionising Fact-Checking with Llama 3

Olasupo Abideen Opeyemi, a youth leader and researcher, is dedicated to leveraging technology for social good.

His focus is on the transformative potential of digital governance in driving positive social change. Olasupo has developed various civic tech products to enhance public engagement and digital governance.

Among them is MyAIFactChecker, which tackles the critical issue of misinformation by providing accurate and user-friendly fact-checking capabilities.

MyAIFactChecker Fact-checks Information in Three Main Nigerian Languages in 30 Seconds

MyAIFactChecker leverages Llama 3’s advanced capabilities to address the misinformation problem effectively.

Llama 3’s state-of-the-art contextual understanding and generative AI capabilities enhance the accuracy and relevance of fact-checking.

This user-friendly platform, MyAIFactChecker, supports multiple languages, including French, Swahili and Nigerian local languages, offering a truly inclusive user experience. This multilingual capability, combined with the voice option for fact-checking, breaks down language barriers and offers a more inclusive user experience.

One of the primary impacts of MyAIFactChecker is its ability to rapidly and accurately assess the validity of claims. Traditional fact-checking methods often struggle with the sheer volume of information and can be slow to respond.

By utilising Llama 3 and advanced search APIs, MyAIFactChecker automates the process, allowing for real-time analysis of claims against a broad range of sources.

These models’ advanced contextual understanding and generative capabilities enable the platform to deliver nuanced, detailed responses that go beyond simple true/false evaluations.

This results in more accurate and informative fact-checking that reflects the complexities of the claims.

Olubayo Adekanmbi and Olasupo Abideen are leading the charge in using AI for social good, demonstrating how Meta’s Llama technology can be harnessed to address critical challenges in education, healthcare and misinformation.

Their work not only showcases the transformative potential of AI but also underscores the importance of innovative approaches to solving some of the most pressing issues facing Africa today.

Through their efforts, they are paving the way for a future where technology serves as a powerful catalyst for positive societal change.