This year’s Deep Learning Indaba was held over the course of six days in Kenyatta University, which sits just off Nairobi’s Thika Road, a bustling 8-lane highway full of boda boda motorcycle taxis and busses shuttling crowds to and from the city center.

Students make up a large portion of Indaba attendees — a chief reason why the conference focuses so intensely on education. The first day of the conference was dedicated to A.I. refreshers and introductory courses, such as statistics and the basics of building neural networks. Over the course of the week, the courses ramped up to more advanced topics. Attendees went to specialized courses on natural language processing, computer vision, deep reinforcement learning, and ethics. Some participated in a hackathon, where they built A.I. that could automatically identify African wildlife to better study and protect endangered species, while others worked with health data to predict and control the spread of malaria.

Establishing a presence in Africa now means building valuable relationships with users from the very start of their digital lives

Days typically started with a keynote: IBM researcher Aisha Walcott-Bryant spoke about data gathering in partnership with the Kenyan government; Princeton University’s Ruha Benjamin gave a course on the inequity encoded into algorithmic systems; and Salesforce’s chief scientist Richard Socher spoke about his team’s research on building more general A.I. systems.

As the preeminent A.I. conference in Africa, Indaba attracts significant attention from tech’s biggest players. American companies, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix, make up 11 of Indaba’s 34 sponsors.

It’s part of a trend in Silicon Valley firms making significant investments across the continent. Google sponsors organizations like Data Science Africa and the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences. In 2018, the company announced its first African research center in Accra, Ghana. Meanwhile, Microsoft and the Bill Gates Foundation have donated nearly $100,000 to Data Science Nigeria, which hopes to train one million Nigerian engineers in the next 10 years.

The appeal of investing in Africa is obvious. 75% of the continent still has no internet access. That’s a challenge for local populations, but also an investment opportunity for international tech firms. Establishing a presence in Africa now means building valuable relationships with users from the very start of their digital lives. A recent investor report indicates Facebook stands to make $2.13 for every user per year in the developing world — up from $.90 in 2015.

Chinese firms have spent years investing heavily in Africa’s tech infrastructure. Huawei installed surveillance cameras around Nairobi on behalf of the Kenyan government, and the company is currently working on large-scale facial recognition surveillance systems around Zimbabwe.

All this foreign investment and data collection raises red flags on a continent scarred by exploitation. Observers like PhD candidate Abeba Birhane argue that these efforts recall previous colonization efforts. “This discourse of ‘mining’ people for data is reminiscent of the colonizer attitude that declares humans as raw material free for the taking,” she wrote in a recent paper titled The Algorithmic Colonization of Africa.

Indaba organizers are well aware of the tension inherent in running an Africa-focused conference funded by American companies.

“A large part of the Indaba’s funding came from international organizations, and many of our international speakers came from international technology companies,” founders wrote after the first conference. “This risks leaving the impression that the best work is happening in the large tech companies, and in countries outside the continent, and that one must leave the continent to have an impactful career in the field.”

That’s why organizers try to balance international sponsors with local ones, and highlight opportunities at African universities and tech companies.

This year’s Indaba conference presented the Maathai Impact award to Bayo Adekanmbi, chief transformation officer of South African telecom MTN, and the founder of Data Science Nigeria (DSN), an organization that has trained tens of thousands of Nigerians to bolster the country’s IT sector.

“A large part of the Indaba’s funding came from international organizations, and many of our international speakers came from international technology companies.”

Adekanmbi arrived at the conference wearing a crisp, white short-sleeve button-up shirt tucked into jeans. He’s tall and broad and walks with a briefcase in one hand, looking ready to evangelize the gospel of data science. He’s revered by his students.

Adekanmbi wants to train a million Nigerian data scientists in the next 10 years, and as such, he takes the threat of a brain drain very seriously. “It’s a big concern. Talent always moves to the area of highest concentration,” he says. “If we do not build another community here, talent will continue to disperse.”

One way of keeping talent at home is remote work. Adekanmbi started a program called Data Scientists on Demand, which facilitates engineers in Nigeria to work remotely for companies around the world.

But that’s not enough. Adekanmbi says that corporations that want to reap the benefits of doing work with Africa should have a physical presence on the continent, and show commitment by investing in local tech communities.

“If you really want inclusion, fairness, and the distribution of knowledge for local relevance, then corporations should be willing to set up centers of excellence and create centers of knowledge around the world,” he said.

Karim Beguir, cofounder of Tunisian A.I. company InstaDeep, built his company after moving back to Africa from a finance career in London. It’s the prototypical startup story: leaving a cushy career with dreams of starting a new company with only two people and two laptops. He taught one of the introductory mathematics courses at Indaba, and ran a two-session seminar on building a start-up: how to find a cofounder, how to get the best tax advantages, and the basics of courting investors. Beguir says he isn’t worried about an African brain drain — he sees own trajectory as a model for cross-continental collaboration.

For many in Africa, partnerships with international tech giants are critical to conducting their work. Indaba attendee Tejumade Afonja, an engineer from Nigeria who cofounded a 16-week A.I. coding workshop affiliated with the global A.I. Saturdays organization, says her Intel sponsorship keeps the entire effort afloat. Intel asks that the organizers and instructors give students the option of using Intel software and hardware, but doesn’t make demands in return for the money, Afonja says.

Teki Akuetteh Falconer, former executive director of the Ghanaian Data Protection Commission and founder of Africa Digital Rights Hub, says that U.S. tech companies are some of the only organizations with aligned interest in expanding internet infrastructure and studying technological ecosystems. “You honestly can’t run away from it. I’m running an NGO, and I have to fund it,” Falconer says. “My resources cannot reach very far. And the strange thing is that the only ones who get me are these [internet] companies.”