Data Science Nigeria AI Bootcamp Winner, Olamide Oyediran Wins Zindi Africa’s Sustainable Development Goals Text Classification Challenge

Olamide Oyediran of the National Agricultural Seeds Council of Nigeria has emerged winner of the Zindi Africa’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Text Classification Challenge.

Mr Olamide who was also a winner at the recently concluded Data Science Nigeria Artificial Intelligence Bootcamp won the challenge edging tens of other participants to claim the prize of $500.

We celebrate DSN's @mideoye for winning the Zindi Africa’s Sustainable Development Goals Text Classification Challenge by classifying text/documents by relevance to 27 indicators

He had previously won at 2018 #DeepLearningNigeria
Leaderboard/details at https://t.co/MjHjwxgbap pic.twitter.com/YkixL9lIxr

— DSN – Data Scientists Network/Data Science Nigeria (@datascientistsN) November 23, 2018

The inaugural challenge was organised by Devex, a media platform and data powerhouse, and hosted on a popular data science competition platform, Zindi. The challenge aimed at classifying text content by its relevance to the measurable indicators of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal #3 – Health and Well-Being (SDG 3).

SDG 3 has 14 targets and 27 indicators. The “targets”, are social outcomes that the UN hopes to achieve by 2030, while the indicators represent the quantitative measurements that will be used to judge whether each SDG target has been achieved by 2030.

🏁Congrats to our #Top3 prize winners in the Devex SDGs #zindichallenge! 1st Place Olamide Oyediran (@mideoye ), 2nd Place Anshu Kumar, 3rd Place Stephen Oni 🙌 You guys rock! Check out the final leaderboard here 👀; https://t.co/iJVI6Zlw6S @DataScienceNIG @bayoadekanmbi @devex pic.twitter.com/2z3BC0X15y

— Zindi (@ZindiAfrica) November 23, 2018

Each participant at the challenge was tasked with creating a classifier that labels text content by the 27 SDG 3 indicators that are most “relevant.” After about 2 months of compiling datasets, 3 winners were chosen. The other winners included Anshu Kumar (2nd Place), and Stephen Oni (3rd Place).

Stephen Oni was also the second placed winner at the Data Science Nigeria Artificial Intelligence Bootcamp.

About Devex

Devex is the media platform and data powerhouse at the centre of the international development community. As a social enterprise, Devex’s goal is to help its audience of over one million development practitioners do more good for more people.

Aside from these, Devex provides journalistic coverage of the development sector, as well as a variety of talent, consulting, and business development services to organizations around the globe.