On the 4th of May, 2024 Kigali/Rwanda, CcHUB Design Lab, a research and development lab innovating for social impact, proudly announced the launch of its Data Science Community of Practice in Rwanda. A pivotal leap toward fostering data and research-driven solutions to societal challenges.
This diverse community includes professionals from sectors such as healthcare, software engineering, education, governance and telecommunication, who came together to brainstorm and create meaningful insights on sectors experiencing data scarcity, the roles of data scientists and researchers, best approaches for data innovation, and the specific needs of data practitioners in Rwanda.
For change to happen, innovation, collaboration, and diversity of thought is crucial. vision is to establish a vibrant ecosystem that facilitates knowledge creation and sharing within our domain of interest (healthcare, education and governance) to address pressing issues across Africa. “We have seen a number of communities in Rwanda that are aggregated around developers. We also have a developer and product thinkers community that is growing. However, we noticed that for frontier technologies such as Artificial Intelligence,there is a need to set up a community of data innovators who can power the change with the technology across different sectors. – Oluwaseun ADEPOJU – CcHUB Managing Partner.
Presenting findings | After debrief discussions |
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During the design sprint, experts engaged in collaborative conversations to identify barriers, constraints, opportunities, and possible solutions for data driven innovation in Rwanda. The insights gained emphasized the importance of collaboration, education, and infrastructure in overcoming challenges around data scarcity and data quality.Moving forward, the community is set to drive meaningful impact by leveraging the collective knowledge, and networks to create innovative data driven solutions aimed at solving societal problems especially in healthcare, education and governance
Moreover, the launch sparked conversations on the needs of data scientists and researchers, underscoring the significance of capacity-building initiatives, international collaborations, and improved access to datasets. These discussions were not just theoretical but aimed at real-world applications and impactful outcomes.
The CcHUB Design lab is a multidisciplinary team of Researchers, Data analysts, Product Designers, and Engineers. We collaborate to solve systemic problems in Health, Education, Governance, and the private sector in Africa.