Cursor AI Hackathon Opens This Weekend at Adwa Victory Memorial Park in Addis Ababa.

The Cursor AI Hackathon runs July 25 to 26 at the Adwa Victory Memorial Park in Addis Ababa. It follows the first Cursor hackathon in Ethiopia, held earlier this year at the ALX Lideta Hub, which drew 149 registered participants and was organised by a volunteer team of local developers. The July edition moves to a larger venue — the memorial park at the heart of Addis Ababa, opened in 2024 to commemorate Ethiopia’s 1896 defeat of Italian colonial forces at the Battle of Adwa, the only African country to repel a European imperial army on the battlefield. Running a technology hackathon there carries a specific civic framing that the organisers have not made subtle.

Cursor is an AI-powered code editor built on top of VS Code, designed to understand an entire codebase and execute complex coding tasks through natural language instructions. It raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation in November 2025, crossed $3 billion in annualised revenue by early 2026, and was acquired by SpaceX’s xAI subsidiary in June 2026 at a valuation of $60 billion — making it the fastest-scaling B2B software company on record, ahead of Slack, Zoom, and Snowflake at comparable stages. 64 percent of Fortune 500 companies have developers using it. A developer using Cursor can write, test, and debug code across multiple files simultaneously by describing what they want in plain language rather than writing every line manually. The tool has made experienced developers meaningfully faster and made coding accessible to people with partial programming skills who previously could not build deployable software.

Ethiopia’s 5 Million Coders Initiative enrolled 5 million participants in two years, with the programme now expanding to 7 million. Most of those participants completed a six-week foundational course. They have basic coding literacy but are not professional software engineers. Cursor is a tool that closes exactly that gap — it allows someone with foundational skills to build things that would previously have required three to five years of professional experience. The hackathon is open to university students, recent graduates, and developers based in Addis, with teams formed randomly on the day. Each team gets a temporary premium Cursor account for the duration.

The Adwa Victory Memorial Park, completed in February 2024 ahead of the African Union summit, sits in Piassa — central Addis Ababa — on a 45,000-square-metre site that includes the Adwa Memorial Museum, an amphitheatre, a library, and youth centres. Ethiopia’s government has used the site for events that carry a message about national capacity and African self-determination. Medemer Artificial Intelligence University, formally approved by the Council of Ministers in March 2026, is the same government’s bet that Ethiopia can train its own AI researchers rather than importing the discipline wholesale.