Afriq Silicon has partnered with the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS) to develop ACTS ML, a free, no-code machine learning platform built for researchers, students, and domain experts across Africa. The platform is designed for anyone who has data and a question to answer, but has never had the technical tools to find the answer themselves.
ACTS ML gives users a complete machine learning workflow in one place. From uploading and documenting a dataset, to cleaning and transforming data visually, to building a training pipeline through a drag-and-drop interface, to reviewing and comparing experiment results. Everything happens in the browser, with no coding required. Datasets are organised into projects, keeping a researcher's data, workflows, and outcomes in one shared workspace that teams can collaborate on together.
The platform's Data Studio lets users work with their data the way they already understand it, like a spreadsheet applying transformations, handling missing values, and preparing features through point-and-click tools. Every change is logged automatically, giving researchers a full audit trail they can rely on when it comes time to publish or present their findings.
At the heart of ACTS ML is ML Flow, a visual pipeline builder where users connect their data to a model configuration and launch a training job with a single click. The platform provisions an isolated compute environment, runs the job, and streams live progress back to the user. When training completes, the experiment is automatically saved. Metrics, model version, and the exact dataset snapshot used, making every result fully reproducible.
The documentation site demonstrates these features with a live example: a water security project analysing survey data with 12,403 rows and 14 columns, using Random Forest to achieve 94.2% accuracy.
"At Afriq Silicon, we believe powerful technology should be accessible to everyone, not just those with a technical background," said a spokesperson for Afriq Silicon. "ACTS ML is built for the researchers who are closest to Africa's most pressing problems, and it is designed to remove every barrier standing between them and the tools they need."
ACTS, the African Centre for Technology Studies, is an intergovernmental research organisation founded in Nairobi in 1988. Its mission is to harness science and technology for Africa's sustainable development, working with researchers and policymakers across the continent on food security, climate resilience, and public health. ACTS ML is a direct expression of that mission, bringing the capabilities of modern data science to the people doing that work on the ground.
The platform is completely free, with no credit card required and no trial limits.
As ACTS ML continues to grow and welcomes researchers, students, and innovators across the continent, it remains grounded in a single belief: that where you are and what you studied should never determine whether you get to participate in machine learning.
ACTS ML can be accessed at actsml.com. Documentation is available at docs.actsml.com.
