Ms. Geek Africa 2025 — Pan-African AI Bootcamp for Young Women in Kigali

Girls in ICT Rwanda, which originated the pan-African Ms. Geek competition in 2014, runs an annual bootcamp-and-pitch competition bringing teenage and young-adult women from across Africa to Kigali to build technology solutions to local problems. The 2025 edition, themed "AI for Africa: Innovate Locally, Impact Globally", was run in partnership with the Smart Africa Alliance and supported by Germany's GIZ.

The competition aims to give young African women hands-on AI-building experience and a platform to pitch solutions to real community problems, alongside prizes and follow-on funding to develop their projects.

Eleven finalists aged 13-21, selected through national qualifying rounds in Benin, Cameroon, Chad, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda and Senegal, took part in a virtual bootcamp phase (6-10 October 2025) followed by an in-person bootcamp in Kigali (13-17 October 2025), building AI-powered prototypes for local problems — for example, Malawi's finalist presented AMINA, an AI health assistant for pregnant and postpartum women.

Winners received cash prizes, devices and funding to develop their projects further, and were scheduled to pitch at the Transform Africa Summit in July 2026; reporting covers who took part, what was built and what prizes were won rather than a standardised skills assessment.

The cohort was small (11 finalists) and self-selected through competitive national rounds, so results should be read as a showcase of top performers rather than average impact across all applicants; there is no controlled or pre/post learning-outcome study.