Teradata, a provider of data warehouse platforms, software and services, is partnering with the Egyptian government's Information Technology Institute (ITI) to host the 4th annual Big Data Hackathon this week in Cairo.

The aim of the Hackathon is to develop new ideas and insights to help solve pressing challenges in Egypt.

"This year, Egypt's Big Data Hackathon is proposing case studies that include consumer goods, transportations and social media. The data is exclusively provided, in partnership with prominent governmental entities, to the Hackathon participants during the three-day event," reads a statement from Teradata.

Development of data skills

The company says the event is also dedicated to enabling the next generation data platform for students pursuing a big data/data science career, big data professionals, programmers and decision makers.

Moustafa Eldwerry, HR Consultant at Teradata says the Big Data Hackathon is part of a branding exercise that aims to spark interest in the field and attract young talent to the company.

"The Big Data Hackathon is one of our main points of entry into empowering young Egyptians with skills. This event has become one of our key capacity building programmes and and it is very useful to have a relationship with ITI. Our team contributes to their curriculum and to the different sessions. It is important to have this exposure among youth and we can give them opportunities to be engaged in the data and data science field. Our data science team have dedicated themselves to preparation for this project over the past four weeks. We also have our interns who also get involved in analysing the use case and assist in getting all the information," said Eldwerry.

The desire to develop Big Data skills among Africa's professionals is one shared by the Africa Data Forum which is planning a series of events in South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria with the aim of sharing ways to develop talent in the sector throughout 2017.

Shepherd Mzinyathi, Africa Data Forum CEO says while the shortage of data science skills on the continent is well established, this can be of value if investments are made into grooming more data data scientists.

"Even as software is gets better every day, there is still no way to replace the skills and experience that a full-fledged data scientist can bring to the table. Organisations can take the view that there is no immediate solution to the problem and rely on the use of mostly expatriate consulting skills or they can choose to take a proactive approach...Africa is endowed with abundant human resources. These resources need to harnessed and channelled into productive and useful career paths that include Data Science."

Teradata adds that tech vendors and subject matter experts will on standby to provide coaching throughout the event.

The first of the Big Data Hackathon events was launched by the ITI in 2014.