Women-led teams shine as 250 youth compete in AI4Startups Datathon

A team of undergraduate students, Sankofa Devs, won first place at the AI4Startups Datathon 2025, held on October 24-25, 2025, at Academic City University in Accra, taking home a €2,500 prize.

The competition brought together 50 participants from across Africa to develop AI solutions for the agricultural e-commerce sector, using real transaction data from Nigeria’s Afrimash platform.

Organised by Blossom Academy and Digital Africa, with support from the EU, the African Union, and other partners, the two-day event focused on practical AI skills, including customer segmentation, churn prediction, recommendation systems, and dashboarding. Women represented 52% of participants.

Sankofa Devs created a scalable customer intelligence system with churn prediction, segmentation, and personalised recommendation engines for Afrimash.

First runner-up RootCause developed a real-time customer intelligence framework with an AI chatbot, while the women-led AfuomAI team won Best Model for its predictive analytics dashboard linking customer behaviour to revenue outcomes.

All solutions will be publicly shared on GitHub to encourage collaboration and the development of locally relevant AI tools.