This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the First International Conference on Pan-African Intelligence and Smart Systems, PAAISS 2021, which was held in Windhoek, Namibia, in September 2021. The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from 41 submissions. The theme of PAAISS 2021 was "Advancing AI research in Africa" and the papers are arranged according to subject areas: Deep Learning; Classification and Pattern Recognition; Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines; Smart Systems.

Healthcare continues to be a field that comes with a lot of pressure attached, and specialists working in that area have to constantly battle the problems that arise from that. And there doesn't seem to be any solution on the horizon – the job is simply highly demanding, and nothing is likely to change that anytime soon. However, we have seen the rise of various systems designed to assist the work of healthcare professionals, and simplify it in different ways. To that end, we're already seeing some great progress – and it's very likely that this is going to continue in the future as well. Artificial intelligence has made the lives of healthcare professionals easier in different ways, and we seem to be barely scratching the surface of what it can do in this regard.