A Chat with Celina Lee: International development executive; Entrepreneur; CEO, Co-founder of Zindi (an official platform for the ITU AI for Good Summit)

This week, Stephen Ibaraki has an exclusive interview with Celina Lee.

Celina Lee is an international development executive turned tech entrepreneur. In 2018, she co-founded Zindi (www.zindi.africa) to create a platform for young people in Africa to build their skills, showcase their capabilities, and connect them with job opportunities. Zindi offers companies, governments, and NGOs a platform to source AI solutions and hire top vetted talent.

With a mission to make AI and data science accessible to everyone, Zindi is a start-up company with African roots but global reach. Today, Zindi's platform serves over 70,000 data and AI practitioners across over 190 countries, including 52 African countries with 28% women.

A few examples of Zindi's partnerships and projects:

• As the official platform for the ITU AI for Good Summit, Zindi hosts 15 AI for Good challenges annually, inviting diverse global talent to innovate for global impact.
• In collaboration with the Ministry of Digital Transformation in Togo, Zindi recently hosted a challenge to develop algorithms for predicting internet connectivity demand in the country, with top participants joining Togo's new Data Innovation Lab.
• Zindi served as the official platform for the inaugural International AI Olympiads (IAIO), hosted by Saudi Arabia's SDAIA in 2024, which saw 90 top students from around the world build algorithms to predict wildfires.
• Zindi was the official AI challenge platform of the Singapore DSTA BrainHack 2023.

Zindi's client roster additionally includes AWS, Google, Microsoft, ARM, EY, Deloitte, and UNICEF. Backed by institutional investors from Silicon Valley and Africa, Zindi is transforming the AI landscape across continents, changing lives one dataset at a time!

A California native, Celina has lived and worked in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. She holds degrees in Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and International Affairs from Columbia University, where she was a U.S. Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow.