By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Tech giant, Google has announced a $37 million package to accelerate artificial intelligence development across the African continent, pledging support for local AI research and projects, covering crop monitoring and adapting technology for the continent’s languages.
The commitment from the US company also includes efforts to support startups in the health and education sectors.
“Africa is home to some of the most important and inspiring work in AI today,” a senior vice president of the company, James Manyika said on Thursday while speaking during the launch of an “AI community centre” in Ghana’s capital, Accra.
The centre will serve as a hub for training, collaboration and experimentation, including programming for AI literacy.
Among the flagship initiatives unveiled is the AI Collaborative for Food Security, meant to connect researchers and non-profits to develop tools to improve early hunger detection, crop resilience and decision-making for smallholder farmers.
The project aims to help African food systems withstand growing climate and economic shocks.
AI has already been deployed by some farmers across the continent, including in nearby Nigeria, long home to a booming domestic tech industry. Local agri-tech companies have popped up to monitor soil conditions for crops or temperature and humidity on chicken farms.
Google is also set to launch a financing platform to back AI-driven start-ups in the agriculture, health and education sectors.
Through its philanthropic arm, it committed $7 million to expand AI education initiatives in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Ghana.
Google also announced $3 million in funding for Masakhane, a tech collective advancing AI tools in more than 40 African languages.
A pair of $1 million research grants meanwhile will go to the African Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and the Wits Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery Institute, both in South Africa.
Sam George, Ghana’s communications and digital technology minister, called on Ghanaians to use AI “to look at how we’re going to fix our national challenges such as flooding, waste management and traffic management”.
Google’s past AI initiatives in Africa have focused on maternal health tech in Ghana and Nigeria, wildfire alerts in East Africa and language model development in Accra and Nairobi.
