This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Southern African Conference on  Artificial Intelligence Research, SACAIR 2020, held in Muldersdrift, South Africa, in  February 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the SACAIR 2020 has been postponed to February 2021. The 19 papers presented were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 53 submissions. They are organized on the topical sections on ​AI for ethics and society; AI in information systems, AI for development and social good; applications of AI; knowledge representation and reasoning; machine learning theory.