I want to raise a broader concern about the state of recent Zindi competitions.

This year, several competitions have had serious leakage issues. In some cases, the issues are not minor they completely compromise the leaderboard and allow participants to score extremely well without building a meaningful machine learning solution.

A recent example is this issue that was raised on 10 June 2026 in this competition

The concern was very serious. The dataset appeared to have been sorted by the target before splitting into train and test, while preserving row order. This means the hidden test labels could effectively be inferred from the row index. As explained in the original post, someone could get a perfect leaderboard score by using the test row order alone, without training any model.

That completely breaks the competition.

The bigger problem is that today is 23 June 2026, almost two weeks later, and there has still been no clear communication from the organizers. No update. No decision. No acknowledgement of what will happen to the leaderboard. Just silence.

This is not acceptable.

Participants spend real time, compute, and effort on these competitions. Some people spend days or weeks building models, writing pipelines, tuning solutions, and sharing ideas. When a leakage issue is raised, especially one that can produce a perfect score, it should be treated as urgent.

At minimum, competitors deserve:

1. A timely acknowledgement of the issue.
2. A clear investigation update.
3. A decision on whether the dataset, leaderboard, or competition rules will change.
4. Communication on whether affected submissions will be invalidated.

Leakage can happen. Dataset mistakes can happen. But silence after a critical issue is raised destroys trust.

Zindi has been an important platform for many African data scientists and ML practitioners, myself included. That is exactly why this is frustrating. The platform should protect the integrity of competitions and respect the time of participants.

I hope Zindi and the competition organizers take this seriously, respond clearly, and improve how these issues are handled going forward.