Microsoft is honored to sponsor Deep Learning Indaba 2025 (opens in new tab), Africa’s premier AI and machine learning gathering. The event will take place in Kigali, Rwanda from 17–22 August 2025. This year’s theme, Urunana – Hand in Hand for AI in Africa embodies solidarity and cooperation. Urunana highlights the need to bridge gaps between academia and industry, established researchers and emerging talent, traditional knowledge systems and modern AI applications. As a longtime partner of the Indaba, Microsoft shares this vision of inclusive, community driven AI. The Indaba brings together research students, academics, research organizations, startups and other groups from across the continent. The six-day program features keynote talks, practical tutorials, hackathons, research showcases, workshops, and awards.
Microsoft researchers will participate in talks, panels and workshops aligned with these Indaba themes:
- Trustworthy and Ethical AI – Building culturally and ethically relevant frameworks that ensure AI systems are aligned with African values and societal needs.
- AI for Business and Finance – Exploring AI solutions tailored to regional financial ecosystems and inclusive economic growth.
- Robotics and Automation – Advancing robotics and machine learning for applications in healthcare, agriculture, energy, and manufacturing.
- Climate-Resilient AI – Applying AI to address Africa’s pressing climate challenges through adaptation and sustainability.
- Data in African AI – Addressing data scarcity, governance, sovereignty, and inclusion in the African AI ecosystem.
- Health and Life Sciences – Leveraging AI and data science to transform healthcare delivery, genomics, and public health across the continent.
- Human–AI Interaction – Designing AI systems that meet people where they are and integrate seamlessly into existing workflows.
- Quantum Machine Learning – Exploring how quantum computing can advance AI applications in health, climate, and finance.
- Responsible AI Leadership – Elevating African AI practices and research into the global conversation on responsible AI.
- NeuroAI and Brain-Inspired Models – Bridging neuroscience and AI to advance brain-inspired models, interfaces, and understanding.
- Natural Language Processing for Africa – Pushing forward NLP research to support the diversity of African languages and local contexts.
- Advanced Compute – Exploring cutting-edge computing technologies—including neuromorphic, in-memory, and quantum—for Africa’s AI future.
Our research at Indaba 2025
- Equitable AI research at Microsoft Research – At Indaba 2025, Microsoft Research is proud to showcase our work on Equitable AI, led by teams across Africa, India, and Redmond. Our research focuses on building human-centered, linguistically and culturally inclusive AI systems that serve underrepresented communities.
- Agriculture copilots for the Global South – In collaboration with Digital Green, Project Gecko develops multilingual, multimodal AI copilots to support smallholder farmers in Kenya and India. These copilots enable farmers to interact via voice, text, and video in local languages like Kikuyu and Swahili, improving access to climate-smart agricultural knowledge.
- Speech technology for low-resource languages – We benchmarked and fine-tuned state-of-the-art ASR models—including Phi-4 and Whisper—on domain-specific datasets in Kikuyu and Swahili.
- Human-centered evaluation – We conducted field tests using real-world audio to evaluate model performance. This approach revealed key insights into model failure modes and informed improvements in data augmentation and evaluation metrics.
Why it matters
AI cannot serve the world unless it is built by the world. The Indaba’s mission to strengthen African AI aligns with Microsoft’s commitment to building AI that is inclusive, globally relevant and culturally grounded.