Celina Lee
CEO of Zindi
Zindi is currently the largest data science and AI developer platform in Africa and the Global South. Through an AI competition model, Zindi aggregates global developers to provide solutions for real-world problems; participants gain public professional profiles that lead to employment opportunities. The platform has partnered with Barbados’s Ministry of Information and Communications Technology to address quality control challenges in the government land survey department’s hand-drawn cadastral maps, developed a prenatal care chatbot for Kenya where doctor-to-patient ratios are severely imbalanced, and conducted satellite data vegetation classification for the Mexican government, among other projects. AI development in Africa and the broader Global South has focused on efficiency from the outset, prioritizing applications adapted to edge devices and low-connectivity, low-power environments — innovations that have already attracted the attention of Silicon Valley companies. Young people in developing countries must become creators of AI, not merely users, and North-South cooperation along with South-South cooperation are vital pathways to achieving this goal.
