- Each summer, Sanethia Thomas, Ph.D., brings UF students to South Africa to create tech solutions for community problems.
- This year, the students toured the Amazon AWS Skills Centre in Cape Town. An AWS site leader then watched the student presentations.
- In turn, Amazon AWS is partnering with UF to provide AI certification training during future Cape Town study-abroad trips.
Perhaps the most significant part of last summer’s study-abroad trip to South Africa is what it will mean for next summer’s study-abroad program in South Africa.
About 20 University of Florida students travel each year to South Africa with Sanethia Thomas, Ph.D., a senior lecturer with UF’s Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering. For six weeks starting in late May, the cohort of mostly engineering students develops technology that helps vulnerable South Africa residents.
But on this trip, executives with Amazon’s AWS Cape Town Skills Centre — one of three in the world — took notice of the UF students during emotional presentations about how their projects impacted those residents.
Consequently, Amazon AWS, which stands for Amazon Web Services, is now partnering with UF to provide Artificial Intelligence certificate training starting next summer. The training will complement the curriculum projects, enriching the already popular study-abroad program with a powerful industry partner in tech-savvy Cape Town.
Executives with Amazon’s AWS Cape Town Skills Centre — one of three in the world — took notice of the UF students during emotional presentations about how their projects impacted those residents.
This gives the South Africa study-abroad trips a strong workforce development component that likely will result in more internships for UF students, particularly 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 with the AWS training, said Thomas, who won the AI Educator of the Year in 2024 and the Junior Faculty Award in 2025 from the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering.
That evolution started after one of Thomas’s students, Blake Coppens, interned with Amazon AWS in Virginia last year, working as acloud support engineer intern. He made connections who had connections, which led to Amazon AWS leading the study-abroad group on a tour of its Cape Town center.
“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,” saidRuwaydah 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 is AI Practitioner.
Thomas invited Kennedy to the end-of-semester showcase to learn about the students’ technology projects to help vulnerable Cape Town residents.
“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,” she said.
Kennedycalled the students’ presentations “extraordinary.”
- Work with The Housing Assembly to build a tracking-and-placement system to help thousands of people displaced by the country’s housing crisis.
- Build an AI safety system on top of Zuzi, an AI chatbot that enables 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.”
- Create a centralized platform for Gender Rights in Tech that streamlines data management and automates calculations, such as tracking grant progress.
- Develop a website and AI chatbot for the Princess Vlei Forum, a nonprofit organization that protects the 269-acre Princess Vlei wetland.
- Build a marketplace, redesign a website and create an AI chatbot to help farmers have 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.”
Student Timothy Wang, a second-year computer science major, said the curriculum projects taught them to focus on who will use the technology and how.
“Personally, this project made me design for a community whose context was completely different from my own,” said Wang. “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 reaches deep into tech these days, particularly AI. AWS chose Cape Town for its first international Skills Centre; the other two are in Seattle and Arlington, Virginia.
While most of the students who have traveled with Thomas to South Africa are engineering students, the program is open to all students. She is currently planning next summer’s trip to Cape Town, and, with the new AWS component, she said 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.”
Additional information, including applications, can be found athttps://ufabroad.internationalcenter.ufl.edu/_portal/tds-program-brochure?programid=14428.
Or contactThomas at sanethiat@ufl.edu.
