Nature: Why AI might be a game-changer for Africa
Excerpt from Nature | By: Rachel Nuwer | September 18, 2024 | Photo: Rose Nakasi/Makerere AI Health Lab
Elaine Nsoesie, SPH Assoc. Professor of Global Health and affiliated faculty in CDS, is a featured researcher highlighting how the use of artificial intelligence is creating tailored solutions for health, development, and more.
To an outside observer, Olubayo Adekanmbi’s career in telecommunications epitomized success. At Airtel and MTN Group, two of the largest such firms in Africa, he applied artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help understand the consumer behaviour of 200 million mobile users in 20 countries, and designed ways of driving their consumption of products. He won awards for his work, but as his career progressed, he felt unfulfilled. “I began to think more about how these data could serve a greater purpose beyond commercial use,” says Adekanmbi, who lives in Lagos, Nigeria. “I felt it was time to make a difference.”
In 2016, Adekanmbi founded Data Science Nigeria, a non-profit group dedicated to bringing AI to sub-Saharan Africa. Since the group’s inception, Adekanmbi and his team have set up more than 100 AI learning clubs hosted by dedicated Data Science Nigeria tutors and volunteers at universities and community centres in 14 African countries, where people can come for weekly or bimonthly lessons in topics ranging from basic data-science literacy to expert-level machine-learning techniques. The group has launched programmes at universities and schools and, in 2020, published the first AI textbook for children in Africa.
In addition to education, Data Science Nigeria collaborates closely with academia, government, non-profit organizations and companies to create practical AI solutions to local challenges. “We try to demonstrate that, even with infrastructural gaps in Africa, we can still deliver the possibility of AI to everyone, everywhere,” Adekanmbi says. “We have the talents and the raw data sets to use AI to improve the quality of lives of people who need it most.”