Guest Post by Somtochukwu Igwegbe, African Quantum Consortium Correspondent, Research & Development, Quantum Africa.
Quantum computing hardware is being built almost entirely outside Africa, in laboratories across North America, Europe, and Asia. That fact has shaped how the continent is usually written into the story: as a market to eventually reach, not a place doing the research. The second edition of the Quantum Machine Learning for Africa (QML4Africa) workshop, organized by Quantum Africa and held in August as part of Deep Learning Indaba 2026 in Lagos, Nigeria, was built around a different premise: that African researchers should be building with quantum tools now, while the field is still taking shape, rather than waiting to be introduced to it later.
I attended the workshop as part of its organizing team, moving between sessions and conversations over the course of the day.
From Kigali to Lagos
QML4Africa began a year earlier in Kigali, Rwanda, as part of Deep Learning Indaba 2025. Organizers billed it at the time as the first QML workshop dedicated to the African continent, organized by Quantum Africa, with instruction led by researchers from IBM Research Africa and New York University Abu Dhabi. That inaugural edition was structured as a half-day, hands-on programme built around IBM’s Qiskit programming framework, with that year’s focus on using quantum machine learning models for cancer classification from histopathology images.
The Lagos edition kept that hands-on structure while widening the material. Sessions covered quantum machine learning, quantum data preprocessing, quantum natural language processing, quantum optimization, and quantum error mitigation, alongside discussions of potential applications in healthcare and finance. Rather than treating quantum computing as a subject reserved for specialists, organizers built the day around students, researchers, educators, and AI practitioners working through the material together on the same tools, rather than only discussing the technology in the abstract.
A Continental Gathering
The setting mattered as much as the content. Deep Learning Indaba is Africa’s largest annual gathering of AI researchers and practitioners. The 2026 edition, held at Pan-Atlantic University under the theme “Sovereign Intelligence,” drew more than 1,000 engineers, researchers, students, and policymakers from 45 countries across the continent and its diaspora, according to the Indaba’s own organizers. Quantum machine learning was folded into that broader programme as one of its technical tracks.
According to Quantum Africa, which organized the workshop, QML4Africa’s own participants this year came from more than 40 African countries. That range matters because the continent’s research challenges are not uniform. A researcher working on quantum applications in Rwanda faces a different funding environment, infrastructure base, and policy landscape than one in Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, or Morocco. Bringing people from across that range into the same room does less for any single lecture than it does for the collaborations, mentorships, and research partnerships that tend to start in hallway conversations rather than formal sessions.
Learning that Leads Somewhere
The workshop also included short research presentations and poster abstracts, with a subset selected for lightning talks, a structure meant to move participants from learning the material to presenting early research of their own. That progression, from tutorial to research to presentation to collaboration, is what organizers describe as the actual goal. Not simply producing people who can define a qubit, but researchers capable of asking what quantum methods could do with African datasets, what post-quantum security means for African industries, and how education pathways connect universities to industry rather than ending at a certificate. Quantum Africa has increasingly framed its own work around that same shift, from raising awareness of quantum computing toward building the workforce that will actually do the research.
What Comes Next
QML4Africa is one entry point into a wider set of activities taking shape across the continent. The next is the African Quantum Alliance Conference (AfriQA) 2026, scheduled for 30 November to 4 December at the AIMS Research and Innovation Centre in Kigali, Rwanda. AfriQA describes itself as a scientific gathering for researchers, postgraduate students, innovators, educators, and industry partners working on quantum sensing and communication, quantum algorithms and machine learning, quantum computing hardware, and quantum science across research nodes in Tunisia, Ghana, South Africa, Morocco, Cameroon, and Egypt. The conference includes a summer school, tutorials, research presentations, and poster sessions, with abstract submissions due 30 September 2026 and travel-support applications due 15 October 2026.
Neither event will settle, on its own, how Africa builds a quantum workforce or what the continent’s contribution to the field looks like a decade from now. But the pattern across both is consistent. Learning happens first, inside a workshop or a summer school. Research follows, inside proposals, posters, and lightning talks. And the collaborations that outlast any single event are what determine whether the student who attends a first QML tutorial is still working in the field five years later. That, more than any individual talk in Lagos, is what QML4Africa was actually testing.
About Author
Somtochukwu Igwegbe is a Research & Development member at Quantum Africa and African Quantum Consortium Correspondent. His work focuses on quantum computing, post-quantum cryptography, and the growth of Africa’s quantum ecosystem. He writes on emerging quantum technologies, digital sovereignty, and the intersection of science, cybersecurity, and public policy across the continent.
