Vodacom and the University of Johannesburg (UJ), in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), have extended their artificial intelligence (AI) partnership through the AI for Africa Hackathon Challenge.
Held at Vodacom World in Johannesburg, the hackathon gave participating UJ students an opportunity to develop and showcase AI-driven solutions to real-world societal challenges across education, health, maternal health, community safety, GBV & femicide, youth employment, accessibility and inclusion, water security and agriculture. The hackathon is the first milestone in the partnership, first announced in July 2026 and which brought together industry, academia and cloud technology to strengthen South Africa's pipeline of job-ready AI and data science talent.
"The first project launched as part of this partnership focused on UJ Master's students within the university's Centre for Applied Data Science. With this hackathon, which more than 150 students signed up for, this partnership is now also reaching undergraduate and masters students pursuing further education to equip them to be at the cutting edge of developing Africa's AI capabilities," says Charlotte Kepadisa, Managing Executive of Big Data, AI & Robotic Process Automation (RPA)at Vodacom Group.
The initiative reflects Vodacom's commitment to developing AI capabilities and preparing young people for the future digital economy. By extending the collaboration to students earlier in their careers with this hackathon, the challenge added a practical, hands-on learning opportunity to the partnership's existing focus on co-designed learning programmes, postgraduate research and industry mentorship.
The AI for Africa Challenge centred on practical application enabling students to explore how AI can be used to address challenges relevant to Africa, while developing skills to support their future employability. It also created a platform for young innovators to demonstrate their ideas and engage with the technologies and approaches shaping the future of business and society alongside AI leaders from Vodacom and AWS.
"Building Africa's AI capabilities requires investment in people as well as technology," Kepadisa adds.
"Through the AI for Africa Challenge, students apply what they have learned to real-world problems, gaining practical experience and confidence to develop their ideas. Supporting these students reflects Vodacom's commitment to nurturing talent. This commitment extends to our people strategy, through which we invest in learning, development and skills programmes that prepare our employees for the opportunities of tomorrow."
Commenting on why they chose to participate in the challenge, Badiswa Motsa (18), a 1st year Business Information Technology says, "Currently we're working on a project where we're developing an app, and my lecturer suggested we take part in the hackathon as we may learn something that can be used in developing our app."
Speaking on what else she hoped to gain from being part of the hackathon Motsa said, "When we came here we actually thought this is more about coding but there's actually different levels to this because you have to think about the business side, the back-end, the font-end, and how is this actually going to help people."
Dione Gwara (19), also in his first year of studying Business Information Technology says "I chose to attend this hackathon as I now have additional coding experience as a baseline and I'm looking forward to showcasing my talent," while Makabelo Pitso, a 1st year BCom Information System student added she was hoping to gain knowledge and get an understanding of how hackathons work, but also "how the industry actually looks like in real life and how we can take what we learn at school into building actual solutions that can be used."
In the broader partnership with Vodacom, UJ's School of Consumer Intelligence and Information Systems, through its Centre for Applied Data Science, is supporting co-designed learning programmes, postgraduate research and industry mentorship. The collaboration connects Vodacom's industry experience with UJ's academic expertise and AWS's cloud, data and AI capabilities.
The partnership also includes research into practical digital challenges. UJ master's students are working on Vodacom-aligned research into autonomous AI systems that could help detect, analyse and respond to cyber threats across telecommunications networks. Further research is exploring blockchain-based approaches to digital identity management and the prevention of identity theft.
AWS supports the collaboration by providing access to cloud, data and AI technologies and computing resources, enabling students and researchers to experiment, build and test solutions.
Together, Vodacom, UJ and AWS aim to connect African expertise with African opportunities continuing to actively drive towards the partnership's ambitions of helping develop a new generation of innovators equipped to contribute to the continent's digital future.
