Ibrahim Denis Fofanah
Data Scientist & AI Researcher
Data scientist and AI researcher at Pace University. I coined Artificial Frictional Unemployment, and built the first machine learning model for crop yield prediction in Sierra Leone. Author of Understanding Agentic AI. I write about agentic systems and applied ML — with a bias toward what actually works, and who gets left out when it doesn't.
Reasoning Models Explained: What Test-Time Compute Actually Costs You
Letting a model think longer is a real capability (DeepSeek-R1 lifted AIME accuracy from 15.6% to 71.0%) and a real bill you pay in tokens and latency on every query. When it is worth paying, and when it is not.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Aug 11, 2026·7 min
Serving a Model: Endpoint, Batch, or Embedded?
Three ways to serve a model, endpoint, batch, or embedded, and the one question that decides which. Most people default to the always-on endpoint. It is the priciest and most fragile option, and usually the wrong one.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Aug 8, 2026·7 min
A 125M-Parameter Model for 11 Languages Is Not a Small Story
UCT researchers built an open corpus and a 125M-parameter decoder-only model covering all 11 official South African languages, nine of them low-resource. The corpus is the real contribution, and the size tells you why.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 31, 2026·6 min
The Broken Ruler: Why "LLMs Now Translate African Languages" Doesn't Mean What You Think
A new study on Hausa and Fongbe translation found that for Hausa, human evaluators preferred a system that no automatic metric ranked first — and BERTScore collapsed entirely. Before you trust a rising leaderboard score in any African language, check the ruler.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 28, 2026·7 min
Rwanda Is Betting It Can Lead African AI Without Owning the Compute
Rwanda is first in Africa on AI policy, agency and summits, but the GPUs are going to South Africa, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria. Inside a small country's bet on governing AI instead of hosting it.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 28, 2026·7 min
Before You Clean Your Data, Ask This One Question: Is It Actually Dirty?
A lender's income field was 23% empty, and the gap turned out to be the best feature in the dataset. Three mechanisms behind missing data, four diagnostics that tell them apart, and why cleaning is a provenance problem in disguise.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 28, 2026·12 min
AI Won't Replace Data Scientists. It Will Replace Lazy Ones.
AI writes the Python, the SQL and the first draft of the dashboard. It cannot attend your meetings, choose your metric, or be accountable for the decision. A working division of labour, and a churn model that failed for none of the reasons you would expect.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 23, 2026·11 min
The First Question Every Data Scientist Asks: What Does One Row Represent?
A falling average order value triggered a discount review. The arithmetic was right and the table was wrong. Why the grain of a table decides whether every metric built on top of it is true.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 23, 2026·12 min
Agent Accuracy Went Up. Agent Reliability Barely Moved.
Twelve metrics, four dimensions, 14 agentic models. The finding: reliability gains lag well behind capability gains. Why a single success rate hides the flaws that actually break deployments.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 23, 2026·6 min
Sierra Leone Is Writing Its First AI Strategy. The Minister Asked a Better Question Than Most Rich Countries Do.
MoCTI and the World Bank are building Sierra Leone's first National AI Strategy on a Compute, Capacity, Context diagnostic. The framing is genuinely good. The binding constraint is that 7 million Sierra Leoneans are offline.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 21, 2026·7 min
Why AI Keeps Rejecting Your Resume, and Why It Is Probably Not Your Resume
Career advice says fix your resume. A peer-reviewed audit of embedding-based resume rankers suggests the rejection is a property of the retrieval system. What is real, what is cargo cult, and what to do.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 18, 2026·7 min
AI in Africa in 2026: The Real State of Play
A practitioner's map of AI in Africa in 2026: where the money flows, who is building, and why compute and data sovereignty decide the rest.
Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Jul 18, 2026·6 min