A new initiative spanning over 40 African cities is kicking off this September with an ambitious goal: to ensure the next generation of AI isn’t just built in Silicon Valley, but is fundamentally shaped by African languages, legal systems, and local realities.
The Cortex Hub, a South African non-profit, has announced the MCP Hackathon Africa 2025, an eight-week program designed to rally developers across the continent. The event, running from September to November, isn’t just another coding competition. It’s a coordinated effort to build out the infrastructure for a new open standard called the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and in doing so, give Africa a foundational role in how artificial general intelligence evolves.
Finalists from across the continent will converge for a showcase in Cape Town on November 11–12, 2025, to pitch their solutions to a global audience of investors and tech leaders.
What is the Model Context Protocol, anyway?
The core technology here is the Model Context Protocol (MCP). In simple terms, MCP is an open standard designed to feed large language models (LLMs) with structured, reliable, and locally relevant information. Instead of an AI model scraping the public internet and guessing about local conditions, it could theoretically query an MCP server to get real-time, verified data.
Think of it as a hyper-local API for AI. An AI agent could use it to access up-to-the-minute crop prices in rural Kenya, understand the nuances of mobile money regulations in Nigeria, or navigate the logistics of cross-border trade between Zambia and the DRC. The hackathon’s participants will be the ones building these servers, effectively creating a decentralized, African-owned layer of context for global AI models.
More than just code: a push for ‘AI sovereignty’
Organizers are framing this as a strategic move toward “digital sovereignty.” The goal is to reduce the continent’s reliance on closed, proprietary AI systems developed elsewhere, which often lack understanding of African contexts. By contributing data on local languages, legal frameworks, and development challenges, participants are essentially programming their own realities into the AI ecosystem.
Andile Ngcaba, Patron of The Cortex Hub, put it bluntly: “The Model Context Protocol is Africa’s opportunity to move from being consumers of AI to creators of the standards that govern it. By coding MCP servers for our towns and cities, participants will be embedding African contexts, cultures, and priorities into the very fabric of AI’s evolution.”
How it works and what’s on the line
The hackathon is a massive logistical undertaking, with local hubs in over 40 cities. These hubs will span Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana), West Africa (Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal), Central Africa (Cameroon, DRC), East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda), and North Africa (Morocco, Egypt).
Participants will get access to bootcamps, mentorship, and technical resources like starter code to get their projects off the ground. The innovation tracks are focused on solving practical problems in key sectors:
- Telecommunications
- Fintech (e.g., strengthening secure payment systems)
- Agriculture (e.g., empowering smallholder farmers with real-time info)
- Logistics (e.g., designing platforms for cross-border trade)
- Public Services
There’s a total prize pool of $9,500 USD up for grabs, with a $5,000 grand prize for the best overall solution. Winners will also get to present their work at AfricaCom, one of the continent’s largest tech events, giving them direct exposure to investors and potential partners.
Industry giants are backing the protocol
A coalition of major African and international tech companies has lined up to sponsor the event, including TESPOK, Seacom, Mauritius Telecom, CSquared, Solcon Capital, and Datacentrix. Their commentary suggests they see MCP as a foundational piece of the next-generation internet.
Ahmed Mohamed, Group CEO of Datacentrix, called MCP “the glue that transforms abstract algorithms into situated intelligence,” adding that it allows Africa to “shift from consumer to creator.”
Others, like Seacom Group CEO Alpheus Mangale, framed it as the “forging of cognitive infrastructure that will bind real-time intelligence to the lived experience of our cities.” Similarly, Pramod Venkatesh, CEO of Solcon Capital, noted the importance of sovereign AI for “technological independence, security, and cultural relevance” as the world enters an era of “Agentic AI.”
Developers, students, researchers, and startups interested in participating can register at the official hackathon website.
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