Artificial Intelligence for Malawi & Africa

Artificial Intelligence is the branch of computer science that focuses on enabling computers to make decisions after learning from past experiences. It’s different from computer programming which pre-codes the instructions for the computer to follow. Therefore, AI can solve problems that a computer may have never seen before.

The field of AI keeps on growing, especially in recent years, due to an increase in the amount of data available and also because computers are becoming cheaper and faster. Apart from that, the internet is becoming cheaper for most people hence now we are all providing more data on the internet like never before. This data can then be used to train different Machine Learning models.

Here in our motherland Malawi, as more people are providing data on the internet using social media platforms, blogs, etc it will open new possibilities for different AI sub-fields such as natural language processing as we can now understand our local languages much better. This is good news as AI can help to preserve some local languages that are not so popular so that they should never go extinct as computer programmers can be able to build programs that can effectively use spelling checks, autocomplete, etc so that more people can be using them more. I am talking about languages like Sena, Lomwe which are getting less and less used by the younger generation. In addition, we can even build better programs that use Machine translation to translate for example English to Chichewa or Spanish to Tumbuka, etc…

Not only that, Artificial Intelligence has its applications in just about every other field, no wonder some people call it the new electricity because just like the way electricity transformed various industries in the 19th century, AI can do the same transformation to various industries in this era.

Here is how it can do that

In a typical business, you have capital which serves as the input for the business, then labor which helps to transform that capital into a marketable product or a service for the business to grow. AI can come into these businesses to boost labor productivity and hence help businesses to grow faster in some of these ways:

• Intelligent automation will allow computers to learn how to do a job and hence speed up the production process.
• AI will save time for managers and workers in the industry so that they can focus on other issues like risk management, human relationships, and other high levels management tasks.
• Companies will be more innovative as they will have more people solving new problems and not just focusing on tasks that can be easily automated.

That’s just an overall application of AI, lets's now dive into specific industries like Agriculture, Healthcare, and Education

Agriculture

Malawi heavily relies on Agriculture, as it employs the largest percentage of the population. However, this industry is facing problems due to climate change, pest/parasites,s and diseases, and land degradation just to mention a few.

Here is how AI can help to solve some of these problems:

• Predict the best time for farmers in Malawi to plant their crops eg. Sowing App by Microsoft.
• Analyze farmers' data and recommend loans from financial institutions hence breaking the barrier that prevents farmers from accessing loans eg. Farm drives a Kenyan Startup.
• Use computer AI’s computer vision to manage a single plant at microscale eg. See and Spray
• Detect crop diseases using computer vision e.g Tanzania Cassava disease detection using TensorFlow

Healthcare

The Malawian health sector is understaffed and usually has a tough time sending information to rural areas. AI can help to solve some of these problems in the following ways:

• Encourage conversations about some sensitive topics that we treat as taboos in our society like sexual & reproductive health. A Kenyan Startup developed Sophie Bot to hold conversations with the user about sexual and reproductive health.
• Help people with visual impairment by translating what the computer sees into words an example is Seeing Ai developed by Microsoft.
• Provide fast and accurate medical diagnoses, a good example is Corti, a Danish Machine Learning company that learns from patients' symptoms to diagnose a disease.

Education

AI can not be the new electricity if it can’t make its way into the Malawian education system. AI can help to automate grading, hence freeing up some time for teachers to focus on student relations and other high-level tasks.

In addition, individual tutoring has proved to be effective for most students, however, finding a tutor and finding money to pay for one is a challenge for most parents in Malawi. Machine Learning offers a new possibility of Intelligent tutoring systems to provide individualized tuition by tailoring educational material to students’ needs and generally helping them work at their own pace.

Furthermore, AI can be able to monitor students' grades, attendance, etc, and then it can be able to use that data to predict whether a student is likely to drop out or not. This can help to alert teachers to pay more attention to some students who may be likely to leave school.

Conclusion

For AI to have an influential impact in Malawi it will need so much effort from all stakeholders such as policymakers, the education system from primary school to tertiary, the industry, and all of society, in general, to be more susceptible to change and innovation. Does AI have the potential to transform a country like Malawi? Yes! and that’s not even debatable. I know it may take a lot of effort but it is very much possible and the effort is worth it.

References

Artificial Intelligence for Africa: An Opportunity for Growth, Development, and Democratisation.” University of Pretoria, https://www.up.ac.za/media/shared/7/ZP_Files/ai-for-africa.zp165664.pdf. Accessed 27 June 2022.