How about studying Data Science and helping people at the same time?

I write about Data Science since 2016. Besides my blog, I also write on Twitter, give lecturers and have my Youtube channel (all of them are in Portuguese). I'm always asked about the path of learning and I always answer that those who want to become a data scientist should spend most of their time in Kaggle. Mostly because it doesn't matter how many courses you took if you don't get your hands dirty. Last month, I changed my mind…

The best place for you to spend your time while studying, imho, isn't Kaggle anymore. Now, I want to recommend you guys: ZINDI. I know that there are probably many out there who already know this web page, but I thought it should reach the most number of people and I'm trying to help to achieve this.

But what's so special about Zindi?

Zindi is a data science competition platform totally focused on solving Africa's problems. Just like Kaggle, we are talking about several datasets and their respective challenges, money prizes, people sharing their code, data scientists being ranked accordingly to their achievements, some small courses and so on, with the big twist of helping those in need.

The first challenge I'm seeing here right now, for instance, is a crop yield prediction. I believe this is the best example since is very straightforward how this would help policymakers. The prize is of $10,000.00 usd — a nice one, for any standards. I myself am working with a NLP challenge in order to assess people perception of the vaccine.

All summed up, TRY ZINDI! Give it a shot and help someone!