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Revolutionising healthcare in Africa through AI: Not when but how fast?
AI technologies have demonstrated powerful applications in assisting public health authorities across Africa to more effectively monitor, predict, and respond to disease outbreaks and epidemics.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents a transformative opportunity for healthcare in Africa and other developing regions of the world, offering a path to leapfrog traditional infrastructure constraints and address deep-seated health disparities.
AI-driven solutions can significantly expand access to quality care, improve diagnostic accuracy, enhance public health surveillance, and increase efficiency among underserved regions and communities.
They can maximise supply-chain efficiencies, reduce administrative tasks, streamline and improve life-saving compliance measures, and generate new capabilities for safeguarding against public-health epidemics that plague the most vulnerable populations.
However, realising this huge potential is currently hindered by critical barriers, including the scarcity of quality data, a deficit in technical skills, inadequate digital infrastructure, and significant gaps in data governance and public trust.
At present, a more meaningful application of Medical Artificial Intelligence (MAI) occurs in developed nations compared with the situation obtaining in Africa.
The United Nations, in two different forums, has signalled a need to change this narrative by bringing stakeholders together to discuss how AI can be used to deliver critical public services and help in the journey toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Africa's healthcare is a complex picture of immense need, facing severe underfunding, vast infrastructure gaps, and critical shortages of healthcare workers— leading to high rates of preventable diseases and out-of-pocket costs pushing people into poverty.
AI application in healthcare in Africa has only seen a few pilots and test cases since 1980, in specific countries, particularly Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Ghana.
In Kenya, improved health worker-patient interaction quality, with evidence of increased number of symptoms, elicited the use of AI through Jacaranda project.
The initiative, aimed at reducing child and maternal mortality, uses machine learning and AI-enabled SMS to provide personalised maternal health information to nearly three million mothers across 23 counties.
In The Gambia, a probabilistic decision-making system assisted rural health workers to identify life-threatening conditions in outpatient clinics.
These initiatives leverage AI to address persistent healthcare challenges such as workforce shortages and limited infrastructure, although scaled adoption is hindered by data scarcity, inadequate infrastructure, and nascent regulatory frameworks.
A report, developed under the Researcher-in-Residence Program at the International Centre of Expertise in Montreal on Artificial Intelligence (CEIMIA), with the support of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), provides an in-depth analysis of the current state of AI in healthcare across Africa.
The State of AI in Healthcare in Africa report elucidates the substantial progress and persistent challenges in integration of AI within the healthcare sector of the region.
As demonstrated in this report, the potential of AI— ability of computers to carry out operations which typically require human intelligence such as speech recognition, visual perception, decision-making and language processing— to revolutionise healthcare delivery in Africa is immense.
AI applications are already making significant impacts in areas such as telemedicine, healthcare operations management, medical imaging, diagnostics, data-driven surveillance, and drug discovery by enhancing clinical decision-making, improving patient care, and increasing access to quality healthcare services.
The increasing adoption is fuelled by both grassroots innovation and strategic government initiatives. The continent’s youthful population, growing mobile connectivity, and rising data science capacity have created fertile ground for AI-driven health solutions tailored to local contexts.
The emerging applications in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, and Rwanda are showing promise in areas from cancer treatment to drone-based logistics.
In Rwanda, Zip Line, which is a US-based health logistics company, utilises drones to overcome the hindrance of mountainous terrains, ensuring efficient delivery of medical supplies to rural health centres.
This approach not only tackles accessibility issues but also establishes a precedent for using technology to surmount logistical obstacles in healthcare delivery.
Containment of infectious diseases using mobile phones is another AI application. Kenya is one of the most highly mobile-connected countries per population in Africa with over 60 million registered sim cards.
This can allow real-time access to maternal and new-born healthcare data that can be used to swiftly identify and respond to childhood diseases or related challenges.
AI technologies have also demonstrated powerful applications in assisting public health authorities across Africa to more effectively monitor, predict, and respond to disease outbreaks and epidemics.
For instance, in a ground-breaking collaboration during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, IBM researchers partnered with local health ministries to deploy an AI-powered epidemiological modelling system, which incorporated diverse real-time data sources, including clinic reports, to track Ebola.
AI in radiology has shown value in selected diagnostic applications and has the potential to improve workflow efficiency, particularly in reporting. In countries such as South Africa and Nigeria, AI technologies are being utilised to improve diagnostic accuracy and streamline patient care.
For example, LifeQ in South Africa uses AI algorithms to analyse biometric data— providing insights into an individual’s health status and potential risks.
Additionally, AI-powered telemedicine platforms are emerging in rural areas, enabling patients to access healthcare services remotely. In addition to reducing the strain on medical facilities, this guarantees that underprivileged groups have prompt medical care.
Telehealth and Remote Care Telehealth platforms have also been increasingly adopted across Africa to help bridge the growing gap between patients and healthcare providers, especially in remote and rural areas where physical access to clinics is often severely limited.
In a seminal report published in 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) extensively documented how digital telehealth services have demonstrated enormous potential to aid in overcoming challenging geographical barriers that hamper the accessibility of in-person medical care.
Accessing timely healthcare services presents significant challenges across vast rural regions in Africa. The sparse distribution of qualified medical professionals over long distances means the nearest clinic may be dozens of kilometres from many communities and the situation is worsened by lack of well-developed road infrastructure.
While meaningful advances have been achieved, more concerted coordination across sectors is required to fully realise the transformative potential of AI and digital health technologies for African communities.
Actively engaging governments to establish long-term funding commitments and enabling policies will be integral, as will partnerships with experienced international NGOs and charitable organisations to strengthen primary care infrastructure, expand telehealth networks, and improve medication access in underserved regions.
Finally, the government and all stakeholders are urged to convene to facilitate the necessary focus on AI and digital health in the advancement of the healthcare sector in Africa.
