The Cortex Hub has announced the launch of the MCP Hackathon Africa 2025, a continent-wide initiative designed to embed African languages, culture, and priorities into the next generation of Artificial Intelligence.
Running across more than 40 cities from September to November 2025, the eight-week program will unite developers, researchers, startups, and students to build practical solutions using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an emerging open standard that enables applications to deliver structured, locally relevant information to large language models. The hackathon will culminate in a continental showcase in Cape Town on 11–12 November 2025, where finalists will present to investors, incubators, and technology leaders from across the globe.
According to Andile Ngcaba, Patron of The Cortex Hub, “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.”
The MCP Hackathon Africa 2025 is a strategic effort to ensure Africa plays a leading role in shaping the infrastructure of Artificial General Intelligence. By contributing African languages, legal systems, and development priorities to MCP servers, participants will help safeguard digital sovereignty and reduce dependence on closed technologies.
Participants can join local hubs in more than 40 cities spanning across Southern Africa including South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Malawi and Mauritius; West Africa, including Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal; Central Africa, including Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); East Africa, including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia; and North Africa, including Morocco and Egypt.where they will access bootcamps, mentorship, peer collaboration, and technical resources including starter code repositories and MCP documentation to support their builds. Innovation tracks will focus on telecommunications, financial technology, agriculture, logistics, and public services, addressing practical challenges from empowering smallholder farmers with real-time information, to strengthening secure payment systems, to designing logistics platforms that support cross-border trade.
“The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the glue that transforms abstract algorithms into situated intelligence. By coding MCP servers for your towns, you are not just writing software – you are inscribing African contexts into the very fabric of AI’s evolution,” said Group CEO of Datacentrix, Ahmed Mohamed. “At Datacentrix, we believe that responsible leadership in the digital age requires us to reimagine business and society through a technology lens. MCP is a practical step towards ethical, contextualized AI that is built with Africa’s realities in mind. By taking ownership at the protocol layer, we can shift from consumer to creator, embedding resilience, innovation, and our collective values into the very core of global AI.
Other sponsors include TESPOK, Seacom, Mauritius Telecom, Csquared, Solcon Capital.