News: Nigeria to Create 1m Jobs Via Data Science

The bootcamp and the summit are supported by Microsoft, 4Afrika, Interswitch,  Keoun.ng, KPMG, OneFi, ProShare Nigeria, Nigerian Bureau of Statistics, DataCamp, BusinessDay, TechCabal, TechPoint.ng, BrandCrunch, CFATech.ng and the Machine Intelligence Institute of Africa.

According to the organisers,the boot camp is aimed at bridging capacity gaps in Data Science for intermediate and expert-level Nigerian professionals and students, who are interested in machine learning, R or Python programming languages and Statistics for advanced data analytics.

“This is part of an effort to make Nigeria the Data Science outsourcing hub for Africa before 2019 and to create one million new jobs during the next 10 years”.

The bootcamp is expected to run for four days between Thursday, 12 October and Sunday, 15 October 2017 in the Lekki axis of Lagos State. The bootcamp will include face-to-face teaching, virtual online classes, and a hands-on hackathon using the Kaggle platform. The sessions will be facilitated by leading local and international PhD-level data scientists, in the industry and the academia.

This second edition will be heralded by a national summit on the Big Data economy to discuss and showcase relevant case studies of how the application of data science is driving socio-economic development in emerging markets. Dr Yemi Kale, the Statistician General of the Federation will be the keynote speaker. The summit will also include robust industry discussions about real-world applications of data science in the economy, consumer behaviour, health, business, city planning, security, agriculture, manufacturing and logistics.

The free residential bootcamp comes with an explicit requirement. All the world-be participants are expected to complete three courses on DataCamp or Microsoft Professional Certificate Track in Data Science. This will be followed by a Kaggle competition to select the best participants for the intellectually stimulating and career-enhancing bootcamp. Best participants at the bootcamp can access internship and mentoring opportunities provided by KMPG, Microsoft 4Afrika and OneFi while DataCamp shall provide free access to its learning platform.

The bootcamp will also include a very competitive hackathon aimed at using Nigeria-centric data to explore, extrapolate and explain local socio-economic issues. The Nigerian Bureau of Statistics and ProShare Nigeria will provide data support services to the participants.

Source: The Sun