AI for Africa’s Future: Innovation, Equity, and Impact

This was the third grand seminar was hosted by Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi together with the Microsoft AI for Good team in April 2025 bringing together practitioners from academia, and industry to discuss how we can develop AI for Africa’s future.

The three-hour event included opening remarks on Building Globally Equitable Generative AI Models and Tools by Dr. Jacki O’Neill, Director of Microsoft Research Africa. And a keynote by Dr. John Wamburu titled “Driving Innovation through Collaboration: Harnessing the Power of AI to Drive Social Impact” where he introduced the Open Buildings dataset developed by his team at Google Research Africa. This dataset is a collection of >1.8 billion building detections across the globe. He showcased how improved mapping from the building footprints is being used to support energy planning, study urbanization and plan surveys in Africa and beyond.

This was followed by a spotlight talk by Dr. Jacqueline Wang’ombe from Digital Green who shared how Farmer.Chat is using large and small language models (LLMs and SLMs) to deliver relevant agricultural guidance at scale while remaining cost-effective, inclusive, and adaptive

Wycliffe Waweru, PSI, gave the final spotlight talk and shared the journey to develop an innovative direct-to-consumer GenAI chatbot that aims to provide personalized health information, empathetic psychosocial support and behaviour change nudges to people living with HIV

The session ended with a panel discussion with experts from academia and industry including Dr. Skyler Speakman (IBM), Dr. Ignatius Ezeani (Lancaster University & Microsoft Research Africa), Dr. Stephen Obonyo (Jacaranda Health), Dr. Jude Mwenda Ntabathia (Fastagger), Dr. William Ogallo (Google) and moderated by Dr. Girmaw Abebe Tadesse.

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