Research Saturday Week 12: Building With African Datasets

​Artificial intelligence runs on data. But what happens when the data needed to build meaningful systems is scarce, fragmented, or difficult to access?

​This week at Research Saturday, we explore “From Data Scarcity to Decision Intelligence: Building AI Systems on African Open Datasets.”

​Our session will examine the realities of working with African data, including limited digitized records, fragmented data infrastructure, multilingual complexity, and restricted dataset access. We will also discuss why locally relevant datasets are essential for building AI systems that truly reflect African contexts and support better research, policy, and innovation.

​Through practical examples from NLP research using Nigerian social media datasets, the session will highlight both the challenges and opportunities in developing AI systems grounded in African data.

• ​Presenter: Emmanuel Asolo

• ​Affiliation: MSc Artificial Intelligence & Data Science, University of Hull

• ​Date: Saturday, 14 March 2026

• ​Time: 5 PM WAT

​Join us as we explore how improving access to African datasets can move us from data scarcity toward decision intelligence.