Artificial Intelligence (AI), coupled with an increase in the available data and improved computing infrastructure, is proving to be a significant facilitator in many sectors that are closely linked with achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Many African countries have tremendous opportunities to use AI in various sectors including finance, agriculture, healthcare, infrastructure, and food security. However, the lack of technical expertise, capacity, and the Covid-19 pandemic pose significant challenges.

The use of AI in finance has been dominantly led by practices in the developed world that do not fit well with the unique financial ecosystem in Africa. Moreover, certain challenges exist that hinder the adoption of AI in Africa with examples including data scarcity and lack of suitable computing resources to train state-of-the art deep learning models.

The workshop aims to bring together academic researchers, industry practitioners, and financial experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges of applying AI to address key developmental problems faced in Africa. The topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Applied AI methods for addressing social, economic, educational, and environmental challenges faced in Africa.

• AI solutions focused on the banking sector covering areas such as fair lending, fraud detection, financial inclusion, and tools to establish creditworthiness with limited data.

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) research for the African languages.

• New benchmark datasets to help researchers applying AI methods for Africa.

• AI methods to assist in poverty reduction and increasing foreign investments in Africa.

This is the second workshop on AI in Africa for Sustainable Economic Development. The first workshop (https://sites.google.com/view/aia2021/home) was held as part of ICAIF-2021 and included talks and panel discussions from J.P. Morgan AI Research (Manuela Veloso, Tucker Balch, Charese Smiley, and Arsalan Mahtafar), IBM Research Africa (Charity Wayua), Google Research (Gamaleldin Fathy Elsayed), Capital One (Oluwatobi Olabiyi), InstaDeep (Karim Beguir) and Carnegie-Mellon University Africa (Kumar Bhagavutula, Patrick McSharry).

Keynote Speakers & Panelists