Teaching this work to people who were never going to be sold it.
The NSK AI Foundation is our non-profit arm, registered as the Bambara Artificial Intelligence Foundation. It runs free training programmes in artificial intelligence, delivered remotely so that where somebody lives does not decide whether they can attend.
A free artificial-intelligence training programme run across African universities, delivered with volunteer instructors and no fee to participants.
Udara runs as a cohort programme: five days of live teaching, hands-on exercises and then a 48-day hackathon, all delivered remotely so that a student in Kano and a student in Kigali sit the same course. The 2026 edition reached 290 universities, and 23 of them registered more than a hundred learners each.
How the Foundation works
Free at the point of use
No fee, no scholarship application, no sponsor deciding who gets in. If a cohort has room, you are in it.
Taught by people who build
Sessions are run by working engineers and researchers, most of them from the community, all of them unpaid for it.
Materials stay public
Recordings, notebooks and reading lists remain available after the cohort ends, for people who could not attend live.
To put artificial intelligence within reach of everybody, so that more people can use it to build fuller lives.
In practice that means running the training ourselves, at no cost, in places where commercial providers see no market. The Foundation is directed by NSK AI’s founder and advised by a board drawn from the community.
Every session in both programmes was taught by a volunteer.
Instructors commit to one session: ninety minutes, live, recorded, on something they work on. No curriculum to write from scratch and no fee, on either side.
Offer a sessionThe Foundation grew out of the community, not the other way round. The same people who run Wednesday paper talks teach the cohorts, and most of the instructors first arrived as participants.
See the community →Teach a cohort, or join one.
Instructors, partner institutions and participants all come through the same door.