In the early morning chill of Kenya’s tea growing zone of Kericho, a young girl named Gladys Chepkurui would embark on a five-kilometer trek to her primary school. The journey was often under relentless rain, her books soaked, and sometimes her stomach empty.
Her family, subsistence farmers in the rural village of Sirich, struggled to make ends meet, and there were times when even a single meal a day was a luxury. Yet, these challenges forged a resilience that would later propel her to the forefront of Africa’s burgeoning data science community.
“There was also the challenge of fees. Sometimes you had to go back home and look for that school fees. I knew that if I didn’t push myself beyond what I saw around me, I’d be stuck in the same cycle,” she tells Impact AI News. “I wanted to be part of the technology shaping the world, not just a spectator.”
Despite the lack of resources, she consistently ranked among the top students in primary and high school, driven by a deep desire to transform her life and lift her family out of poverty. The long hours of study by candlelight, the missed meals, and the absence of proper shoes for her daily walk to school became fuel for her ambition.
After scoring well in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE), Gladys was admitted to Kenyatta University in Nairobi to pursue a degree in Nutrition and Dietetics. “Having been brought up from a setup where having a meal was hard and then now you come to university, now you want to be that person who is able to cater for your family, for your needs,” she says.
Her choice of course stemmed from a childhood spent watching malnutrition and hunger afflict many in her village. She wanted to make a difference through food science.
It was at Kenyatta University that Gladys’s trajectory shifted dramatically. Her roommate, a Computer Science major, often stayed up late working on her laptop, debugging code and discussing tech trends. Gladys became curious.
“She was always busy on her computer, and I wondered what made her so engrossed,” Gladys says. “She introduced me to Zindi, and that changed everything.”
Zindi is Africa’s largest data science competition platform, connecting data scientists with organizations to solve real-world problems. Launched in 2018, Zindi has grown into a vibrant community of over 85,000 data practitioners across 52 African countries and beyond. Its mission is to make data science and AI accessible to everyone, empowering young tech talent with skills and opportunities.
Though she had no background in coding or data science, Gladys dove into Zindi’s challenges with gusto. Her first competition was the Uwazi Citizen Science Challenge, sponsored by Amini, a Nairobi-based climate tech startup.
Participants were asked to gather extensive and high-quality data on key crops such as coffee, cocoa, palm oil and forestry across select African countries. The data collected through this competition would later serve as valuable input for developing machine learning models and other analytical tools aimed at predicting crop yields, assessing environmental impact, and guiding land-use planning.
“When I joined Zindi, I was so happy because I had a passion of being a data scientist. Upon joining Zindi the challenge the competition was on data science on ollecting pictures from different geographical areas,” she recalls.
Despite joining the competition with only a month left, Gladys was undeterred. “At first I was a little bit scared because you already see your competitors already top on the leaderboard.” She ventured into forests alone, often without food or proper gear, facing the challenges of unreliable electricity, long distances, and the dangers of rural terrain.
“I had to wake up at 4 a.m., be out collecting data by 6 a.m., and continue until 6 p.m. Data collection on plants and forests meant I had to go to the forest alone, always scared but I had to carry on and collect the required data,” she recounts. “Sometimes my phone would die, and I had no power bank. But I kept going.”
She also lacked training in geolocation tools and data labeling. But through YouTube tutorials, mentorship from Zindi volunteers, and relentless trial and error, Gladys taught herself the basics of data science. Her hunger to learn, she says, was born from necessity.
“Where I come from, no one talks about artificial intelligence or data science,” she says. “But I knew that if I could master this, I could open doors for myself and others.”
Her efforts paid off. Out of hundreds of participants across the continent, Gladys emerged the winner of the Uwazi Data Challenge, earning a $500 prize and an internship with Zindi. Her victory was not just a personal triumph but a testament to the potential of untapped talent in Africa.
“What a man can do, a lady can do better,” she says with a smile. “I knew I had to put in extra energy to beat those already on the leaderboard.”
With her new internship, Gladys began working on various Zindi initiatives, helping coordinate challenges, mentor beginners, and spread awareness about the importance of data in solving Africa’s development problems. She also enrolled in Python programming classes and began taking free online courses on platforms like Coursera and edX.
Today, Gladys is deeply passionate about the intersection of technology and development. She wants to use data to solve critical issues in health, agriculture, and education across Africa. Her current focus is on promoting data collection standards in rural areas, ensuring that machine learning models are trained on quality, representative data.
“I’m not just interested in numbers; I’m interested in quality,” she emphasizes. “Perfection is what I always aspire to do.”
Gladys’s journey is emblematic of a broader movement in Africa, where platforms like Zindi are democratizing access to data science and AI. By providing real-world challenges and fostering a community of learners, Zindi is nurturing a new generation of African tech talent.
Looking ahead, Gladys is optimistic about the future of technology in Kenya. She notes the government’s efforts to implement AI in data collection and service delivery, seeing it as a pathway to improved opportunities and services.
“I see that Kenya is always on the line, and we’d be somewhere in the developed world and even improve our services as far as attending to our citizens is concerned,” she says.
She also emphasizes the importance of local context in AI development. “If we train AI with Western data, it won’t work here. We need to collect our own data, train our own models, and build solutions that reflect African realities.”
For now, Gladys is focused on building her skills and contributing to the continent’s tech ecosystem. “Imagine a farmer being able to predict crop yields with data from his own village,” she says. “That’s the future I want to help create.”
Her journey from the rain-soaked paths of Kericho to the digital highways of data science serves as an inspiration to many aspiring technologists across the continent.
She concludes: “The cloud doesn’t care where you come from. If you can connect to it, you can change your life.”
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Emmanuel Benson