This is a private hackathon for the July-August 2020 cohort of the Zindi mentor program.

Financial Inclusion remains one of the main obstacles to economic and human development in Africa. For example, across Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda only 9.1 million adults (or 13.9% of the adult population) have access to or use a commercial bank account.

Traditionally, access to bank accounts has been regarded as an indicator of financial inclusion. Despite the proliferation of mobile money in Africa, and the growth of innovative fintech solutions, banks still play a pivotal role in facilitating access to financial services. Access to bank accounts enable households to save and facilitate payments while also helping businesses build up their credit-worthiness and improve their access to other finance services. Therefore, access to bank accounts is an essential contributor to long-term economic growth.

The objective of this competition is to create a machine learning model to predict which individuals are most likely to have or use a bank account. The models and solutions developed can provide an indication of the state of financial inclusion in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, while providing insights into some of the key demographic factors that might drive individuals’ financial outcomes.

This is a private hackathon whose primary purpose is for the July-August 2020 cohort of the Zindi mentor program.

Teams and collaboration

You may participate in this competition as an individual or in a team of up to four people. When creating a team, the team must have a total submission count less than or equal to the maximum allowable submissions as of the formation date. A team will be allowed the maximum number of submissions for the competition, minus the highest number of submissions among team members at team formation.

Multiple accounts per user are not permitted, and neither is collaboration or membership across multiple teams. Individuals and their submissions originating from multiple accounts will be disqualified.

Code must not be shared privately outside of a team. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform. (i.e. on the discussion boards).

Datasets and packages

The solution must use publicly-available, open-source packages only. Your models should not use any of the metadata provided.

You may use only the datasets provided for this competition. Automated machine learning tools such as automl are not permitted.

If the challenge is a computer vision challenge, image metadata (Image size, aspect ratio, pixel count, etc) may not be used in your submission.

If external data is allowed you may only use data that is freely available to everyone. You must send it to Zindi to confirm that it is allowed to be used and then it will appear on the data page under additional data.

You may use pretrained models as long as they are openly available to everyone.

The data used in this competition is the sole property of Zindi and the competition host. You may not transmit, duplicate, publish, redistribute or otherwise provide or make available any competition data to any party not participating in the Competition (this includes uploading the data to any public site such as Kaggle or GitHub). You may upload, store and work with the data on any cloud platform such as Google Colab, AWS or similar, as long as 1) the data remains private and 2) doing so does not contravene Zindi’s rules of use.

You must notify Zindi immediately upon learning of any unauthorised transmission of or unauthorised access to the competition data, and work with Zindi to rectify any unauthorised transmission or access.

Your solution must not infringe the rights of any third party.

Submissions and winning

You may make a maximum of 30 submissions per day.

Note that there is no public/private leaderboard split for this challenge.

You acknowledge and agree that Zindi may, without any obligation to do so, remove or disqualify an individual, team, or account if Zindi believes that such individual, team, or account is in violation of these rules. Entry into this competition constitutes your acceptance of these official competition rules.

Please refer to the FAQs and Terms of Use for additional rules that may apply to this competition. We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.

The evaluation metric for this challenge will be the percentage of survey respondents for whom you predict the binary 'bank account' classification incorrectly.

Your submission file should look like:

unique_id                   bank_account
<string>                    <number>
uniqueid_1 x Kenya              1
uniqueid_2 x Kenya              0
uniqueid_3 x Kenya              1  

There are no prizes for this competition.

Competition closes on 26 August 2020.

Final submissions must be received by 13:59 PM GMT.

We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.