Presenting Africa’s contribution to science

I was born and raised in Senegal, in a family with 15 siblings. My mother didn’t finish high school, and my dad didn’t go to school at all. He died in his youth. I don’t know what made my mother send me and all my siblings to school, but I thank her every day.

I was especially attracted to STEM subjects, but I did not have anyone in my family who knew about careers in this field. In 2005, before my final year of high school, I went to a summer camp in Burkina Faso sponsored by the Pathfinder Foundation, an organization in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, that promotes girls’ education in Africa. While there, I met its founder, Ceik Modib Diyar, an African astrophysicist who worked at NASA.

After high school, I studied in France, and eventually attended Telecom Paris, part of the Polytechnic Institute in Paris. I then spent a year at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, earning a double master’s degree in engineering and applied statistics. After graduating in 2013, I worked in Washington as a junior risk management associate at the World Bank, which lends money to low-income countries. But I left after a year; I felt that the impact of my work in Africa was not tangible.

I also heard about machine learning and artificial intelligence, and in 2014 I started my doctorate in this field at Columbia University in New York.

I graduated in May 2020, and three days later I founded TAIK. My inspiration was the negative view of Africa that I have experienced since I left Senegal. There is this misconception, which is spreading in popular culture, that Africans are all sick and poor and incapable of much. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I felt even more strongly that we Africans must oppose this narrative.

I said, “Let’s tell these stories from our side.” I want people on the continent to be inspired by all Africans who do amazing things at STEM around the world. That is what I would like as a young person in Senegal - to know more about the contribution of Africans to STEM throughout history.

Wide scope

TAIK has three pillars. The Inspire Pillar shares stories of Africans who have succeeded in STEM. The Inform Pillar allows students to know what they can do with a STEM background. The Pillar of Education speaks to African history - including the history of science - from an African perspective. We also run programs to enroll children in schools across Africa and provide them with information on different areas of study, how to apply to university and graduate schools, and how to find funding.

TAIK is everywhere for people of African descent. We want our content to be available, so our website is in Kiswahili, French, English and Arabic. At TAIK, we are investing in pan-African optimism - we see a great future for Africa and its people. But we also have a pragmatic approach - we know problems and solutions that could work.

We want to see a world in which young Africans have the education and self-confidence they need to build their continent. You can’t look to the future if you don’t have a grounded knowledge of where you come from. Some of the historical ‘facts’ we have been told are untrue. There are amazing women who have fought against colonialism in Africa, but we are not taught about them.

Last September, I set up a research group at Princeton to study ways in which artificial intelligence can address problems in energy, climate science and health care. As I embarked on this journey, I thought all children deserved the same opportunity. So last year, TAIK launched an annual campaign in Senegal called Education Pour Tous, or Education for All, to go door-to-door in poor neighborhoods to convince parents that children, especially girls, should be enrolled in school. Sometimes there is an attitude that girls should not go to school, and many families do not have the means to afford tuition and supplies, so we share backpacks full of notebooks, pens and pencils. In 2021, we teamed up with a Senegalese social organization called Team Niintche and enrolled more than 1,100 children in primary school. We raise money for this effort through the GoFundMe platform.

Joint mission

Many of TAIK’s volunteers are African scientists for whom our website resonates. They share similar stories as they travel the world and do not see themselves presented in the right way. When I ask them why they want to join TAIK, they say, “We want to change the narrative, we have great stories.”

Currently, TAIK has about 40 key volunteers and it is a difficult job to manage them, I will not lie. There are challenges for those living in Africa: power outages, slow internet connections and occasional language barriers. It is not an easy job, but it is an important job that needs to be done. We are all in a virtual workplace on the online Slack platform, and everyone knows who is doing what. It is important that TAIK is conducted transparently: it gives people an agency to take ownership and be the initiators of the business.

For others who might want to start a non-profit body in Africa, one piece of advice is to look for great people who believe in the mission and have a good work ethic. We are ambitious at TAIK and we made sure early on that everyone knows what the expectations are. I already have a lot of work to do as an assistant professor, so if this was just for fun, I wouldn’t be doing it anymore.

I am happy to be able to return through TAIK. We have a story on our website about the discovery of a 13-year-old boy from Tanzania in 1963. The Mpemba effect, named after him, describes how boiling water freezes faster than water at a lower temperature. When we posted this story on Twitter, a woman from Zimbabwe retweeted it with the comment: “I shared this article with my son and now he wants to do an experiment. You never know who will read it and see it for themselves and know that they can do it too.

This article has been edited for length and clarity.