Building Practical AI Skills for Eswatini: Highlights from the AI Eswatini x AMLD Africa Learnthon

Across Africa, the conversation around Artificial Intelligence is shifting rapidly from theoretical discussions to hands-on creation. To accelerate this momentum locally, AI Eswatini partnered with AMLD Africa to host an intensive virtual Learnthon, bringing together students, developers, and tech enthusiasts to turn AI concepts into working code.

The initiative sparked massive engagement across the continent, attracting over 500 registrations and an active turnout of nearly 400 participants throughout the program. The mission was clear: equip local and regional innovators with practical skills and framework experience tailored to tackle real-world challenges across health, agriculture, education, and governance.

6 Weeks, 6 Core Pillars of AI

Every Saturday, learners gathered virtually via Microsoft Teams for interactive sessions structured around live code demos, hands-on tutorials, and contextual applications. Guided by expert facilitators and speakers across the continent, the curriculum progressed from foundational machine learning to autonomous agents and large-scale data systems:

  • Week 1: Machine Learning Fundamentals (1 November 2025)

  • Focus: Understanding the end-to-end ML workflow-from feature engineering to evaluation using scikit-learn and Python on Google Colab.

  • Week 2: Deep Learning Fundamentals (8 November 2025)

  • Speaker: Antony Gitau (AI Engineer, Kenya)

  • Moderator: Betty Mukankusi (Software Engineer, AR/VR)

  • Focus: Deconstructing neural networks, activations, and backpropagation by training image recognition models in TensorFlow/Keras.

  • Week 3: Reinforcement Learning Fundamentals (15 November 2025)

  • Speaker: Johnson Makmot (Software Engineer, Digiverse Solutions, Uganda)

  • Focus: Exploring reward systems and decision-making environments using OpenAI Gym and Stable Baselines3.

  • Week 4: Generative AI Fundamentals (22 November 2025)

  • Speaker: Titus (Uganda)

  • Focus: Diving into transformers and diffusion models using Hugging Face and OpenAI tools to generate text and creative visual content.

  • Week 5: AI Agents Fundamentals (29 November 2025)

  • Speaker: Alamin Musa Magaga (AI Engineer & CiviTech Professional, Nigeria)

  • Focus: Harnessing LLM multi-step reasoning, task automation, and LangChain to build practical chatbots for local knowledge retrieval.

  • Week 6: Big Data — The Brain of the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Duel (13 December 2025)

  • Speaker: Dr. Rania Mkhinini Gahar (Doctor Engineer in Computer Science, Tunisia)

  • Focus: Exploring big data analytics, statistical machine learning, and data pipelines necessary to power real-world AI applications at scale.

Practical Impact and What Comes Next

Beyond live coding sessions, participants engaged through weekly practical challenges, collaborative community channels, and project showcases. Learners gained hands-on experience using industry-standard tools and libraries including scikit-learn, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, LangChain, and big data processing frameworks.

By grounding foundational concepts in hands-on building, the Learnthon built local technical capacity while strengthening Eswatini’s presence in the broader Pan-African AI ecosystem.

Keep Building with AI Eswatini

The Learnthon was just the starting line. AI Eswatini continues to build pipelines for advanced research, hackathons, and mentorship opportunities.

  • Join Our Community: Ready to start building? to connect with local developers, researchers, and mentors.
  • Get Involved: Follow AI Eswatini and AMLD Africa on social media for upcoming bootcamps, workshops, and project collaborations.