Perhaps the most significant outcome of last summer’s study-abroad trip to South Africa is the impact it could have on next summer’s programme.
Each year, about 20 University of Florida students travel to South Africa with Sanethia Thomas, Ph.D., a senior lecturer in UF’s Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering. For six weeks beginning in late May, the mostly engineering-focused cohort develops technology solutions designed to support vulnerable residents in South Africa.
However, during this year’s trip, executives from Amazon’s AWS Cape Town Skills Centre, one of only three such centres in the world, took notice of the UF students after watching emotional presentations about how their projects were making an impact on vulnerable residents.
As a result, Amazon AWS, which stands for Amazon Web Services, is now partnering with the University of Florida to provide Artificial Intelligence certificate training beginning next summer. The training will complement the curriculum projects and add a major technology industry partner to the already popular study-abroad programme in tech-focused Cape Town.
The new partnership will also give the South Africa study-abroad programme a stronger workforce development component, which could lead to more internship opportunities for UF students, particularly those from the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering.
“Our students get to go international and understand a different culture,” Thomas said. “And a different culture brings a different way of thinking. So, it challenges their critical thinking skills, and the organizations get technology that our students build handed to them.”
Students will earn credits through the AWS training, according to Thomas, who received the AI Educator of the Year award in 2024 and the Junior Faculty Award in 2025 from the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering.
The partnership developed after one of Thomas’s students, Blake Coppens, interned with Amazon AWS in Virginia last year as a cloud support engineer intern. Coppens made connections that eventually led to Amazon AWS hosting the study-abroad group for a tour of its Cape Town centre.
“The AWS Skills Centre in Cape Town was proud to host 21 students from the University of Florida for a hands-on session led by our team. From the moment the students arrived, the energy was electric, filled with exciting discussion and incredible innovation,” said Ruwaydah Kennedy, AWS Skills Center Cape Town Site Leader.
“AWS is building this big Amazon warehouse in Cape Town,” Thomas added. “We were able to sit in on a presentation. They were talking about the certifications, and I thought, ‘This would be amazing if this can happen every year, and our students are able to get the certifications.’”
The AWS certification the students will pursue is the AI Practitioner certification.
Thomas later invited Kennedy to the end-of-semester showcase to see the students’ technology projects developed to support vulnerable residents in Cape Town.
“The projects this year were much better, and it’s because of AI. They were able to produce a lot, and it was the biggest wow factor ever. There was not a dry eye in the showcase because the students are doing such meaningful work,” Thomas said.
Kennedy described the students’ presentations as “extraordinary.”
The projects developed by the students included work with The Housing Assembly to build a tracking-and-placement system designed to help thousands of people displaced by South Africa’s housing crisis.
They also built an AI safety system on top of Zuzi, an AI chatbot that allows gender-based violence survivors to share their experiences anonymously.
“Gender violence is a huge issue in Africa, and so there is an app where if you are at risk or in trouble, you can just press the button and it’ll immediately call 911,” Thomas said. “So our students got a chance to help build guardrails for that application.”
Another project involved creating a centralised platform for Gender Rights in Tech to streamline data management and automate calculations, including tracking grant progress.
The students also developed a website and AI chatbot for the Princess Vlei Forum, a nonprofit organisation that protects the 269-acre Princess Vlei wetland.
In another project, they built a marketplace, redesigned a website and created an AI chatbot to help farmers gain access to technology and sell their crops.
“The work is very meaningful,” Thomas said. “We’re impacting thousands and thousands of lives, so when the students gave the presentation, it moved everybody. And Amazon was there watching all of this.”
Timothy Wang, a second-year computer science major, said the curriculum projects taught students to focus on the people who would use the technology and understand how it would serve them.
“Personally, this project made me design for a community whose context was completely different from my own,” Wang said. “Housing Assembly operates in Cape Town, shaped by the effects of apartheid-era housing policy. Before writing code, I learned about the history to understand who I was designing for, which taught me that building for people outside my own experience takes effort to understand their reality first.”
Cape Town’s economy has become increasingly connected to the technology sector, particularly artificial intelligence. AWS selected Cape Town as the location for its first international Skills Centre, with the other two centres located in Seattle and Arlington, Virginia.
Although most students who have travelled with Thomas to South Africa have been engineering students, the programme is open to students from all disciplines.
Thomas is currently planning next summer’s trip to Cape Town and said that, with the addition of the AWS component, she may need to plan for two student cohorts each year.
“We look forward to welcoming the University of Florida back in 2027 as we collaborate with EduAfrica to bring AI training into the program,” Kennedy said. “As UF is part of AWS Academy, students will be able to pursue AWS certification, adding a recognized workforce development credential to an already transformative experience.”
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