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.