Data Science Workshop — Mathematics Association of Nairobi University

DASCLAB hosted a full-day Data Science Workshop in partnership with the Mathematics Association of Nairobi, drawing over 120 participants from universities, government agencies, and private sector organisations across Kenya.

The workshop was structured as three parallel tracks: an introductory R programming stream, an intermediate Python and machine learning stream, and an advanced visualisation and reproducible research stream using Quarto and R Markdown.

Workshop Highlights

The morning plenary featured a keynote on the state of data science in East Africa, presented by Dr. Grace Wanjiru, highlighting skills gaps identified in a survey of 300 Kenyan employers. Attendees then dispersed into their chosen tracks for four hours of hands-on instruction.

Particular enthusiasm surrounded the GIS and spatial statistics session, where participants mapped county-level health indicators using the sf and tmap packages in R, producing publication-ready choropleth maps of malaria prevalence across Kenya.

Resources

All workshop materials — including slide decks, R scripts, datasets, and Jupyter notebooks — have been made freely available on the DASCLAB GitHub repository. Participants receive continued access to the DASCLAB learning portal for 90 days following the event.