I am not sure how, but I found Data Science Africa, whose mission it is to promote data science in Africa. For now, they are limited to organizing and running meetups across Africa, mostly focused on R, although there are higher albeit more ambitious targets. Anyway, since I’m in Accra, I contacted them to see if I could help in any way, and biz, baz, boom… I’m now leading the Accra R-Community! The community consists of 300+ interested people (another guy set started the meetup and it’s been gathering users sans local leadership) with varying levels of ability in R. To learn more about our meetup and our activities, please check: http://www.meetup.com/Accra-R-Users-Group/
For now, there seems to be more active people that are more beginner-level.. therefore our initiatives will center around beginners, getting them up and running with R basics. I think there are several elusive advanced R-users… let’s see if I can entice them to show their face and present their research. Regardless, I think as time progresses we will cover increasingly complex R subjects, and eventually maybe we will touch upon other tech like git and maybe Python.
For the moment, the meetups will be organized at MEST, a great entrepreneurial hub at the cutting edge of Tech in Accra.
So for today, Accra is taking baby steps… but tomorrow they will CONQUER THE WORLD!! #Southpower
PS – I would also like to give a shoutout to my colleague in CapeTown, South Africa. Their R community is much more developed. So much so, that they are being considered to host the satuRday convention next year! There will be three of these events sponsored by the R Consortium, one in Hungary, one somewhere in the USA and the third elsewhere in the world. Cape Town is a contender in the last category and currently sitting in second place. Please vote for Cape Town to host a satRday conference next year, your vote could put us in the lead. Please vote here http://app.doopoll.co/poll/ZznsEGPnmbFafim2c now!