Tejumade Afonja is expanding access to AI education in Nigeria through community-driven learning and research grounded in African contexts.
Tejumade Afonja has become a prominent voice in Nigeria’s world of artificial intelligence. Though she trained as a mechanical engineer, she now focuses on AI research and community education. In 2018, she co-founded AI Saturdays Lagos (AI6), a volunteer-run initiative that offers free weekend study groups to help beginners and early-career professionals get a proper grounding in machine learning, deep learning, and related fields. Since launching, the programme has run several cohorts and built a thriving community of learners who meet both in person and online.
A bit of her career background
Tejumade Afonja graduated from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology in 2015 with first-class honours in mechanical engineering. She started her career in software development and frontend engineering, but gradually found herself drawn more deeply into artificial intelligence.
By 2018, she’d been named an Intel Software Innovator for AI in Nigeria and later worked as an AI engineer at InstaDeep. During this time, she noticed something troubling: there simply weren’t enough accessible, well-structured learning pathways for young Nigerians wanting to break into AI. This observation would go on to shape much of her community work.
Establishing AI Saturdays Lagos
AI Saturdays Lagos emerged from what Afonja and her co-founder, Femi Azeez, saw as real barriers keeping people out of AI, which include high costs, limited institutional support, and few clear routes for self-taught learners. Their approach was straightforward: 16-weekend study groups, run twice yearly, built around widely used online courses like Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning curriculum.
The programme started with in-person sessions but has since adopted a hybrid model, particularly after the pandemic, which has allowed more people to participate remotely. Throughout its cohorts, AI6 has emphasised hands-on learning, peer support, and community-led mentorship.
Afonja is vocal about the need for African learners to access AI education without facing prohibitive costs or having to rely entirely on international resources. She often speaks about the wealth of talent across the continent and the importance of nurturing it locally. This thinking has also influenced her research work on datasets and models designed for local challenges, things like speech recognition for African accents and image datasets relevant to African contexts.
She’s also contributed to global academic conversations, serving on the organising and steering teams for workshops such as Machine Learning for the Developing World (ML4D) at NeurIPS.
Impact and community outcomes
Since 2018, AI Saturdays Lagos has trained a diverse group of participants, students, early-career professionals, and aspiring researchers among them. The initiative has supported hundreds of learners through its cohorts.
Many participants have gone on to secure technical roles or pursue further education abroad. The community has also produced research and project work, including datasets tailored to African contexts. Some projects from the AI6 research track have received external backing, such as a grant worth $8000. Over the years, the initiative has been supported by organisations including Google’s Women Techmakers and Intel, which have provided funding and resources to keep the programme free for learners.
In 2024, the female co-founder was recognised amongst the Top 40 AI Achievers by the Society for AI Advancement for her contributions to AI education and community building.
Beyond her community work, Afonja’s academic research reflects a commitment to ethical and inclusive AI development, particularly around data privacy and speech technologies that accurately represent African users. Her ongoing doctoral work aligns with these priorities and aims to address gaps that global models often miss.
Whilst AI Saturdays Lagos isn’t the only initiative working to broaden AI education in Africa, it has become one of the more visible volunteer-led efforts in Nigeria. Through its structured cohorts and emphasis on accessibility, it represents a grassroots approach to building AI capacity on the continent.
