DeepSeek will turn Africa AI on its head; Nigeria civil service goes GenAI
Africa AI News weekly digest...
Good morning, and welcome to Africa AI News – Weekly News Digest.
Before we get stuck into the African AI news, we have to mention the elephant in the room. DeepSeek arrived fully formed and seemingly perfect, blowing out the water the unquestioned wisdom that AI requires billions of dollars spent on gargantuan data centres crammed with specialised GPUs and some software developers. The media frenzy about it instantly wiped $600-m off Nvidia’s market cap, and riddled the next year’s worth of fundraising attempts by US-based AI companies with fist sized holes. Anthropic must be very cross.
But if the single biggest limiting factor to AI R&D and adoption in Africa is a scarcity of compute resources, then DeepSeek’s astonishing ability to do what OpenAI or Meta does at a fraction of the compute and energy cost should be transformative for Africa’s AI community. It’s resource light, and it’s open source.
AfricaAINews.com took DeepSeek for a whirl, running the 1.5b and 14b versions on an oldish M1 Macbook (where it did a pretty good job), as well as the Web chatbot version and compared the outputs. FWIW, the output was not a far cry from what Google Gemini when given the same prompt.
What’s your view? Reply to this mail and we’ll share it with our community.
On with this week’s issue!
/Roger
Digital Government
Nigeria’s Civil Service ‘Service-Wise GPT’
#Nigeria #civil-service — Streamlined access to critical information, faster policy drafting, automated workflows - that’s the intent behind “Service-Wise GPT”. Intended to reduce bureaucratic inefficiency, the tech introduced by Nigeria’s Head of Civil Service, is intended to put some real application behind’s Nigeria’s AI ambitions to transform and modernise the state. (TechPoint)
Applications
Local clinic group brings Finnish remote diagnostics tech to Zambia
#Zambia #healthcare — Zambia’s healthcare leaped forward with the launch of remote health diagnostics technology developed by Finnish company 73Health by Carepeak Specialist Clinic in Lusaka. It is intended to help doctors remotely conduct examinations and diagnose patients. This launch is intended to be the start of a major expansion into Africa by 73Health. (Tech Africa News)
Libyan mobile operator Almadar Aljadid deploys AI chatbot
#Libya #telecom— Libya’s number two mobile company Almadar Aljadid partnered with Egypt-based AI developer WideBot to implement a customer service AI chatbot platform that can communicate with customers in Arabic, English and Libyan dialect. (Connecting Africa)
Zambian Football Fans don’t like automated AI cameras
#Zambia #broadcast — The Zambian football association (FAZ) is considering kicking satellite sports broadcaster SuperSport into touch because of its AI automated cameras. Fans hate it for lagging the action, focusing on the wrong things and going wide when they should be zooming in. The tech was widely booed by South African schools rugby fans three years ago. (Zambian Football)
TreeVision speeds Kenya’s national forest inventory
#Kenya #conservation — Most developed countries have considerable research and information resources for conservationists: inventories of fauna and flora, trends and patterns rich for the picking. Developing countries? Not so much. So Cedric Kiplimo at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology developed a stereoscopic camera with AI features to identify, size and catalogue trees to leapfrog the decades long process of patiently cataloguing the natural environment. (VOA)
Education
Call For Applications: AI4D scholarship program 2025
#Africa #education — The African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS) has received a grant to support the scholarship of women candidates in sub-Saharan Africa, notably in training of PhD students and supporting the research work of Early Career Academics in AI and ML. Deadline for submissions March 14. (MSME Africa)
AfDB, Intel to train millions in AI skills
#Africa #training — The African Development Bank (AfDB) and tech firm Intel have partnered to equip three million regular Africans and 30,000 government officials on the continent with advanced AI skills, in a trebling of what Microsoft promised last week. No information as to what the budget is or how it will be done. (Connecting Africa)
Policy
Egypt and France to collaborate more in AI, capacity building
#Egypt #policy — Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology met with the French Ambassador in Cairo to discuss ways to attract more French investments to the Egyptian communications and information technology sector, and enhancing cooperation between Egypt and France in AI. (SIS)
Conferences
Egypt to host the Africa’s first conference on AI doing dentistry
#Egypt #healthcare — Egyptian Maxillofacial Radiology Alliance hosted the continent’s first conference to look at how modern AI technologies can assist dentists and maxillofacial surgeons. It finishes today. (Ahram Online)
Deep Learning Indaba 2025 in Kigali call for workshop proposals
#Rwanda #deeplearning — The Deep Learning Indaba 2025 will run from 17 to 22 August 2025, a now regular gathering of Africa's machine learning and AI community, hosted this year at the University of Rwanda. Calls for papers and workshops has gone out. (MLDS Africa Google Group)
[ This newsletter was human edited and AI edititited ]