Backed with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), five Nigerian innovators are revolutionizing business, education and health among the country’s underprivileged using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Three of them were among other innovators from across the world whose works were showcased to a global audience of 1,400 scientists, policymakers, and leaders at the just-ended 2023 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Dakar, ROBERT EGBE, who was in Dakar, reports.
It is 5am in Igando, a suburb of Lagos, Nigeria. Bus conductor Shola and his bean cake seller wife Shade have been up for an hour, trying to make sense of their expenditures for the past month. They have two young children and Shade is expectant for a third, so the couple wants to make better financial decisions with its joint income for the days ahead. But neither parent is literate. So, Shola picks up her low-end smartphone from where it is charging on the floor in a corner. She scrolls to an app, taps on it, and begins speaking into it in the only language she knows, Yoruba, her mother tongue. She tells the phone about their daily incomes, expenditure patterns and financial challenges. Then the couple waits. A short while later, husband and wife receive a voice-based response, also in Yoruba, giving them financial advice as well as suggestions on loans or financial products that are most appropriate for them based on how much they earn and how they spend money. The personal voice chatbot is like recording a voice-note on the phone and getting accurate answers to their financial enquiries with ease and simplicity.
The chatbot used by Shade and Sola is a communication-simulating computer programme designed to mimic human-to-human conversation. It was developed by Olubayo Adekanmbi of a Lagos-based firm, Data Science Nigeria. The platform is so innovative that it can even read and explain financial documents, meaning “a user can upload their statement of accounts, or a loan agreement and our app solution will explain the details to them,” Adekanmbi said in a chat with The Nation.
Adekanmbi and four other Nigerians are among the 50 grant recipients of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMFG) from 17 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) who are developing global health and development solutions for their communities using Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled large language models (LLMs). The solutions have proven beneficial to rural women farmers and business owners in Nigeria who receive critical financial advice through a voice-to-text interface of the AI-enabled LLMs.
Following an announcement by the Foundation on August 9, each grant recipient received up to $100,000 to advance its research project, for a total of $5 million in grants. The findings of these projects were shared at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Dakar, Senegal, between October 8 and 11.
Apart from Adekanmbi, two other Nigerians – Nneka Mobisson and Chinazo Anebelundu – also showcased their work with AI in Dakar.
Mobisson of mDoc Healthcare has integrated ChatGPT-4 into her firm’s chatbot, called ‘Kem’, to provide virtual self-care coaching for low-income women of reproductive age in Nigeria, to improve its accuracy and capacity to respond to queries with evidence-based information.
Dr. Mobisson, a pediatrician with a Master’s degree in clinical and public health, told The Nation how it works.
She said: “We created a chatbot called ‘Kem’. Imagine a woman with three children at home, she has high blood pressure, she’s a trader, has been working all day and has to attend to her kids when she gets home and it’s 2am. She can pick up the phone, write to Kem, and talk to it about what she’s worried about. She may be worried about the rash on her baby, so, Kem answers her and talks to her about that rash. But because Kem knows that she has high BP since that information is already inputted in the system, it will initiate a conversation about her, and find out how she’s doing, etc. That dialogue will help her think about herself and what changes she can make for herself as well so that she can continually be there for her baby. Right now it is texts, but our next focus is to integrate voice into it.”
Anebelundu, also of DSN Ai Innovations Limited is using AI for education delivery by adapting learning content for rural students. She is developing a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)-focused multimedia learning platform by leveraging GPT and DeepBrain text-to-video AI tailored to rural students to increase their engagement. Through AI, the system is able to recognise five categories of students, according to their level of intellectual ability, and provides video lessons that can be personalized to a specific student. Anebelundu told The Nation that the work bears in mind that Nigeria’s estimated 18.5 million students out of school can potentially be reached through a more engaging and personalized AI system. The platform integrates local contexts and nuances to enhance student comprehension of STEM subjects. It also tailors the learning to the preferences of each student and employs visual activities such as interactive STEM laboratory simulations.
Grand Challenges
This year’s Grand Challenges – the 20th in the series – was hosted by the Global Grand Challenges network of partners and the government of Senegal. It was sponsored by Grand Challenges Canada, the United States Agency for International Development, Wellcome, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).
The Grand Challenges Annual Meeting has become the preeminent forum for global health Research and development (R&D). It convenes a dynamic community of researchers and practitioners and provides a platform to learn about cutting-edge scientific advances, build new local, regional and global collaborations and explore how to build a more effective, inclusive and equitable ecosystem for global health R&D.
This year’s edition, themed “Science Saves Lives,” brought together funding and research partners throughout the Grand Challenges network and beyond to discuss and share innovative solutions to global health and development challenges. Over four days, the meeting featured a set of more than 15 scientific tracks, three mainstage plenary sessions, more than 20 roundtable discussions, and other sessions that focused on topics such as health technology research, innovation for the next generation, harnessing the power of science against malaria, and AI for the world.
81 grants in Nigeria
The Grand Challenges has awarded no fewer than 3,833 grants worth $1.6 billion in 119 countries around the world since 2005, including 81 grants in Nigeria.
Not all of the grants yielded the desired results though. Nevertheless, BMGF C0-Founder Bill Gates, who spoke at the opening plenary of the Meeting, expressed delight at the current state of global health, compared to what it was 20 years ago, before the Grand Challenges was founded.
“The state of global health in 2003 was, frankly, awful. Huge numbers of deaths but tiny amounts of money spent on science to save lives. That lopsided equation is what inspired the partners who created the Grand Challenges. It was shocking and unjust, and we believe we could do something about it,” he said.
Gates noted that the Grand Challenges have spurred advances in critical areas of health that have helped to save millions of lives around the globe.
He referenced, for instance, the Grand Challenges grant that went to an international team, led by Douglas Young of Imperial College London, to develop drugs for latent TB.
“The consortium that Young’s team organized laid the groundwork for the TB Drug Accelerator, a public-private partnership with 25 members that’s largely responsible for the amazingly robust TB drug pipeline we have today,” Gates said.
Another example is the Grand Challenge grant supported work to reduce the mosquito population and stop disease transmission. The original idea of the project, now called Target Malaria, was to use homing endonuclease genes to drive a bias for male offspring so that it was inherited preferentially from generation to generation, gradually preventing mosquitoes from reproducing themselves.
Gates noted that researchers have now successfully tested gene drives on caged mosquito populations in the UK and Italy.
“Now the work is shifting to several malaria-endemic countries where gene drives would actually be tested if and when they receive regulatory approvals and local support,” he said.
Obstacles
But challenges remain.
“AIDS, TB and malaria still kill about two and half million people a year, and five million children still die before their fifth birthday, these are preventable deaths.
“To save more lives, we need to keep challenging ourselves to innovate. How can we make vaccines that protect for a lifetime? There are plenty of big scientific challenges to solve, we need to talk about how it will happen,” Gates said.
Why AI is important
Acknowledging the commendable progress in global health R&D that has been made in the past 20 years, Gates called for “much bigger improvements in the next 20 years to approach health equity.”
To achieve this, the BMGF founder extolled the importance of AI – such as deployed by Adekanmbi, Mobisson and Anebelundu – to the global efforts to save lives. Importantly, he noted the necessity of all countries, not just the rich, to be involved in the process.
He said: “AI has the potential to revolutionize R&D by linking data and people in new ways. We need to make sure—right now, while the technology is still in its formative stages—that all countries get to participate and all countries benefit, not just wealthy ones.
“We recently gave Grand Challenges grants to 50 innovators in low- and middle-income countries to pilot different AI approaches. I am optimistic that you will generate knowledge and develop technologies that help fulfil the potential of AI in global health.”
He also noted the importance of the right regulatory framework to speed things up.
“I call upon the WHO to make the emergency declarations needed to unlock additional regulatory pathways for some of the deadliest infectious diseases and I call on the regulatory authorities to use them,” Gates said.
He also called for the world to spend at least $3 billion more every year on global health and development R&D in order to close the critical gaps in funding for neglected diseases.
Funding: Walking the talk
But it wasn’t just jaw-jaw. The BMGF walked the talk by making huge donations to the global efforts to save lives.
Gates announced a $30 million investment from the Foundation to support a new AI platform to provide African scientists and innovators with the technical and operational support they need to turn promising ideas into scalable health and development solutions.
Other investments announced at the event include a total of $40 million in funding to advance access to South Africa-based Quantoom Biosciences’ low-cost, mRNA research and manufacturing platform.
The Institut Pasteur de Dakar (IPD) and Biovac, research institutes with vaccine manufacturing experience based in Senegal and South Africa, respectively, will receive $5 million each to acquire the technology and will be able to use it to develop locally relevant vaccines.
To further advance the technology and lower costs for commercialization, the foundation also will provide $20 million to Quantoom Biosciences, ensuring Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) can benefit from the next-generation mRNA health tools. The Gates Foundation will also grant another $10 million to other LMIC vaccine manufacturers.
This new funding builds on the foundation’s previous US$55 million investment in mRNA manufacturing technology.
Finally, the European Commission, the European Investment Bank and the BMFG announced a €1.1 billion financing partnership to address critical global health opportunities: eradicating polio and ensuring that innovations in health are more accessible to the people who need them most.
