data-science-basicsafricagetting-startedpractical-guide
Getting Started with Data Science: A Practical Guide for African Practitioners
7 min read · 1,390 wordsBy Orandi Felix
**Zindi (zindi.africa) is your best friend.** It's an African ML competition platform with datasets about crop disease in Uganda, credit scoring in Tanzania, air quality in Lagos — real problems, real data, active community. Enter a competition even if you don't win. The leaderboard feedback loop accelerates learning faster than any course.
**On internet and compute constraints:** Cloud notebooks like Google Colab give you free GPU access with just a Google account — no local GPU required. For data storage and sharing on variable bandwidth connections, work with compressed CSVs or parquet files instead of Excel. A 50MB parquet loads 5x faster than an equivalent Excel file.