It’s a wrap! The Ghana June 2022 Ishango Fellowship Journey
After 8 weeks of hard work, developing their technical and professional skills, we are both happy and sad to announce that the June_July Ghana 2022 fellowship has concluded. Below we share highlights from the fellows’ experience each week as they went about delivering their projects, learning from key experts, partner visits and more.
Week 1 & 2
On the 5th of July, the first day of the fellowship, our fellows were met by our Programme manager Courage Seyram and Jan Ravnik, our Data Scientist in Residence. They were introduced to the programme and had a chance to get to know each other. The next day, it was time to get to work! Fellows had induction calls with their host companies to understand the projects they are working on and were introduced to the tools and data they would be working with. Later on, in the week, they had their first expert session on Data protection and data ethics delivered by James Walsh from the Alan Turing Institute.The fellows spent their second week getting stuck into their projects. They had regular reflective and brainstorming sessions with Jan and our Tech Lead, Oliver Angélil, met their host companies to discuss ideas, approaches and progress made so far.
They also had an insightful expert session delivered by Jiaming Chen from ResMed titled “Data storytelling: How to make an impact with your analysis”
Week 3 & 4
Highlights from week 3 included a visit from the GIZ team who were interested to meet the fellows, and learn more about the fellowship programme and explore opportunities for collaboration. The fellowship is not all about work. It is also about building global connections and culture exchange! That week fellows had a fondue night with chef Jan introducing them to a piece of his culinary culture.During week 4, fellows had their mid-term presentations where they showcased the work they had done so far to the Ishango.ai team and mentors who provided input and feedback. The fellows also bade farewell to Jan, whose time with them had come to an end after having spent a month supporting them to get up to speed on their projects.
Week 5 & 6
With the first half of the fellowship gone, the fellows accelerated working on their projects taking into consideration the feedback and inputs from their midterm presentations. They had an expert session delivered by Chih Chun Chen from SmartRecruiters titled “Garbage or Gold: the importance of high-quality data” which emphasised the importance of good quality data to the effectiveness of machine learning models. They also had a soft-skills training session on pitching and presentation delivered by Denise Vorraber from FEMIDS who provided fellows with the key tools which they would need to use for their final presentations.
Week 7 & 8
The last two weeks of the fellowship are usually crunch time! Fellows have to finalise their project to deliver a tangible outcome and also prepare for the final presentations. During the final week, fellows presented their work and outcomes to their host companies with great results.
To close off the programme, fellows paid a visit to the Google AI centre in Accra and had a closing ceremony at iSpace Foundation, Ghana where they got to interact with representatives from different data science organisations in Accra.
