Microsoft is proud to be a sponsor of the Deep Learning Indaba (opens in new tab), Africa’s largest gathering of the artificial intelligence and machine learning community. Each year the Indaba brings together thousands of students, researchers, and practitioners from across the continent to learn, share, and strengthen African leadership in AI.
The 2026 edition, hosted in Lagos, Nigeria, focuses on Sovereign Intelligence: the ability for Africa to build, steward, and understand its own systems, its own data, and its own scientific direction. That mission sits at the heart of Microsoft’s commitment to advancing AI that serves communities across the Global South. We are honored to support the Indaba as a sponsor and to take part through technical exchange, mentorship, and direct engagement with the students and researchers shaping AI on the continent.
Microsoft’s participation
Microsoft Research anchors our technical participation at the Indaba, as part of a coordinated Microsoft presence that also includes Microsoft Government Affairs Africa, Microsoft AI for Good, and the Office of Responsible AI. We are at the Indaba as contributors to the ecosystem, bringing our research directly to the researchers and builders shaping AI on the continent.
Workshops and sessions
Microsoft Research Africa co-organizes “Beyond Benchmarks: Scaling Multi-Turn Participatory AI Evaluations in Health and Education (opens in new tab),” together with YUX and Kitala. Our researchers also present technical work across the programme, including the accepted PazaBench paper.
Sponsored session
Microsoft hosts “How Foundation Models Are Transforming Science, and Why Africa Matters,” alongside invited talks and panels from AI for Good and MGA Africa.
At our booth
Throughout the week, our researchers will be at the Microsoft Research booth to meet attendees, continue conversations from the sessions, and go deeper on the research we are pursuing across Africa and the Global South. Feedback from the community year after year is that the mentorship and one-on-one conversations are among the most valued parts of the Indaba, and the booth is where much of that happens.
Program highlights
The Indaba 2026 programme spans a rich set of workshops and sessions on African AI. We are proud to take part in this community and to see the breadth of work on the continent, including:
- Navigating the Intellectual Property Frontier of African AI
- Beyond Benchmarks: Scaling Multi-Turn Participatory AI Evaluations in Health and Education (opens in new tab) (Microsoft Research Africa, with YUX and Kitala)
- Reflecting on Online Polarization and the Weaponization of Social Media in Africa
- Data, Culture, and Community: An Interactive Exhibition of the AfricaNLP Playbook and Annotation Tool
- 4th TrustAI Workshop at the Deep Learning Indaba: How Trustworthy Are LLM-as-Judges? Implications for the African Continent
- An Introspective Look at the African AI Landscape
- Building Africa’s Digital Future: DIGITAfrica AI/ML and Connectivity Blueprints for a Pan-African Research Infrastructure in Digital Sciences
- How Do We Know AI Works? Lessons from Real Evaluations
- Whose Intelligence? Building Agentic AI in Africa without Frontier-Model Dependency
- Building Africa’s Human Data Infrastructure
- From Prototype to Impact: Scaling Responsible Climate AI from Africa
- 4th Workshop on Robotics & Automation in Africa
- Data Science for Health in Africa
- GeoAI for a Climate-Resilient Africa
- Building Red-Teaming Capacity for AI Safety Evaluation in African Contexts: A Hands-On Protocol Workshop
- AI Engineering in Africa: A Deep-Dive Discussion
- The NeuroAI Workshop at the Deep Learning Indaba 2026
- Sovereign Supply Chains: Frontier AI for Resilient African Logistics
- AI on Digital Public Infrastructure: Building Inclusive and Impact-Driven Public Intelligence Systems in Emerging Economies
- Quantum Machine Learning for Africa (QML4Africa)
- Cultivating Sovereign African NLP
- Wamoja.Africa: Building a Pan-African Community Lowering Barriers to Participation in Collective Intelligence and Cooperative / Democratic AI – through Art, Research and Practice
Supporting students and scholars
Our sponsorship funds named scholarships that help talented students attend the Indaba, alongside a presence at the exhibition, prizes for standout poster-session research, and participation in mentorship sessions with our researchers.
Join us
Whether you are a student taking your first steps in machine learning, a researcher pushing the frontier, or a builder shipping AI for your community, we would love to connect with you at the Indaba. Visit our booth and come talk to the Microsoft Research team about building the future of AI in Africa.