August 19-21, 2026 (Hybrid): Data Tamasha Africa 2026
by Piyush Mathur
You can now register for the upcoming ‘Building with Data’ (hybrid) event, to be held in Zanzibar, Tanzania, on August 19-21, 2026, as part of Data Tamasha Africa 2026. The event promises to bring together data experts, innovators, students, business persons, data enthusiasts as well as observers from Africa, especially the Eastern African region (or thematically interested in that region).
A call for participation was circulated previously; its deadline was May 31, 2026. The event lineup is now open for registration as an observer and for opportunities for interaction (both on the ground and online). The event has no funding available for travel. This is the registration link (for the event’s online as well as offline version):
Background
It may be useful to note that Data Tamasha started out in 2017 as an annual event organised by the Dar es Salaam-based Tanzania Data Lab (dLab), which housed the following teams that were part of that first event’s organisation: the Data Collaborative for Local Impact Initiative (DCLI), the Data for Local Impact Innovation Challenge (DLIIC), and Data Zetu. Since 2017, there have been three additional Data Tamasha events that took place in 2019, 2021, 2023. The foregoing, however, were different from the DataFest Africa events, which started out in 2019, and then took place annually from 2021 to 2025.
The upcoming August 2026 event merges the above two, and is jointly organised by the Kampala, Uganda-based Pollicy and dLab.
The 2017 event saw over 270 attendees, and the 2026 event has every likelihood of seeing way more. To be sure, the event will have attendees from outside Africa, just the same.
Piyush Mathur, Ph.D., is a member of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR), and the author of Technological Forms and Ecological Communication: A Theoretical Heuristic (Bloomsbury/Lexington Books, 2017).