What do I mean by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution? With all the AI hype, it is worth explaining it again from my point of view. Coined by Stanford University researcher John McCarthy, AI is the ability of a machine or a computer to think and learn – and therefore act in ways that are smart. The broad concept or idea here is to build machines capable of thinking, acting and learning like humans.
In the past decade, AI has been cited as one of the transformative technologies that have made big strides in many industries including retail, healthcare, banking and finance, agriculture, manufacturing, travel and entertainment, education, public administration and many more. I have witnessed and experienced some of the tangible values AI has created first-hand as a Data Science professional and educator.
Let me state a few examples here to drive home my point. In healthcare, many hospitals in the USA have used AI for early disease prediction for such as kidney diseases, heart diseases and cancer. The value here is the many lives saved by predicting those diseases in advance and applying preventive or treatment measures in time. Additionally, AI can help decrease the cost to develop medicines. Supercomputers have been used to predict from databases of molecular structures which potential medicines will or will not be effective for various diseases.
Another familiar use-case is in agriculture. By looking at images of plants, AI is used to tell in real-time what diseases the plants may be suffering from and recommend potential treatments in real-time. Soil defects are also being determined using AI. In many large farming areas of developed countries, AI-based robots are used for large-scale harvesting – which brings a lot of efficiency and solves labour scarcity problems.
I can list many of the use-cases for AI in the retail and financial sectors where I spent most of my professional life; from customer experience management to inventory and supply chain optimisation, as well as loan default and fraud predictions. AI has saved multiple retail companies and financial institutions many millions of dollars and induced revenue growth in many areas where AI-driven predictive insights are used in decision-making. The case of Amazon, where over a third of its revenue is from AI-driven product recommendation and personalization, is a popular example here.
Let me come back to my main questions: Given all the benefits AI provides to those who are using it appropriately, what has Ghana done so far to join the ride? What should we be doing now to take full advantage?
In the past five years, I have followed with keen interest the developments around Data Science (including data mining, machine learning and artificial learning) in Ghana. There have been some good initiatives taken by individuals and institutions in Ghana that are noteworthy.
Firstly, Google opened a Google AI research centre in Accra Ghana during the latter part of 2018. This was the first of its kind in Africa, and has created a lot of excitement and awareness. Since then, the research centre has brought in top machine learning researchers and engineers to focus on AI research and applications in Africa. The centre has also collaborated with local universities and policymakers on AI uses in Ghana and Africa as a whole.
In 2019, myself and Dr. Augustine Denteh founded Ghana Data Science Summit and hosted the first event in collaboration with Deep Learning Indaba, under their IndabaX programme. The goal of the Ghana Data Science Summit is to bring increased awareness and capacity building efforts in data science and analytics to Ghana. This aligns with the goals of Deep Learning Indaba, whose mission is to strengthen machine learning in Africa.
Through their IndabaX programme, Deep Learning Indaba has partnered with Ghana Data Science Summit since 2019 to host our annual Ghana Data Science Summit, dubbed IndabaX Ghana, which has delivered hands-on training and workshop presentations on data management, data mining, machine learning and artificial learning to over 500 participants in Ghana.
In the same year of 2019, the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) launched the African Masters of Machine Intelligence (AMMI) programme in Ghana. AMMI is a one-year intensive programme supported by Facebook and Google. This programme has helped train a lot of young talent in Africa, and looks very promising for the years ahead.
There are many Ghanaian Data Science/AI startups which became more established between 2019 and today with focus on solving many different business problems. Notable among them are: Wave-2 Analytics (a data science consulting start up with focus in retail and customer experience); Superfluid Labs (Analytics company providing various predictive analytics solutions for businesses); BACE Group (using AI for identity verification solutions); Zipline Ghana (medical and logistics delivery using AI-powered drones); minoHealth AI Labs (an AI Healthtech startup); karaAgro AI ( an AI-powered Plant & Pest Disease Detection and Precision Agriculture ); ChatBots Africa (provides organisations with AI-powered bots for consumer interaction); and CYST (their research unit focuses on AI, especially in Natural Language Processing). I am sure there are many more I may not currently know about.
It is also worth mentioning efforts of the FAIR Forward programme by GIZ, whose main goal is to partner with local stakeholders and government institutions to ensure AI for all. They initiated the AI fellowship programme in 2021 with Blossom Academy (a Ghanaian start-up focusing on training young people with Data Science and Machine Learning skills), and we’ve seen some good success with that programme.
There are also various individuals and volunteer groups that are also using AI to solve Ghana’s challenges. Given that there are over 37 written languages in Ghana, the efforts of Ghana NLP to use Natural Language Processing for language translation is worth celebrating. Open language translation APIs will facilitate effective communication among people and increase business activity.
Even though all the Data Science and AI initiatives mentioned above have contributed to Ghana’s own AI awareness and capacity building, a vast majority of them face many challenges – and as such could not scale beyond the very small ‘AI-aware’ group of individuals. Most of the challenges can be grouped into the following three major groups:
- Inadequate stakeholder engagement and support for data and AI initiatives
Stakeholders include government leaders, policymakers and business executives, as well as leaders of higher educational institutions that play significant roles in adopting new technologies in the country. Even though there are many AI initiatives in Ghana, they are mostly driven at small scale by individuals and small organisations which do not have the capacity to influence major decisions or funds to build AI technologies at a scale that will benefit various sectors of the country’s economy. There is no adequate and detailed policy and regulatory framework, along with supportive infrastructure, to implement AI initiatives at scale.
Despite the many start-up companies that are solving several business problems with AI in Ghana, business leaders are not fully engaged or showing keen interest in learning more about AI and the value it creates. Technical AI experts can build transformative capabilities, but it takes executive business leaders to listen, learn and promote the adoption of these technologies. Because these stakeholders are not fully engaged, there are not enough processes or infrastructure in place to collect and store useful data – which is the prerequisite of AI technologies.
- Inadequate training of local talent to build, measure and communicate the impact of data and AI initiatives
There is still a lot of talent-gap when it comes to end-to-end AI implementation in Ghana. Most of our educational and training programmes are very theoretical and lack the practical rigour that it takes to build, test and deploy AI capabilities which will solve our local business and public challenges. Because of this situation, most of the current initiatives lack AI strategists who can not only build AI products but also measure and communicate the impact of these initiatives to get stakeholder buy-in. Some of the AI initiatives in Ghana are also blanket ‘copy-and-paste’ solutions from developed countries, and therefore fail to holistically address the unique problems of Ghana.
- Trust and AI Ethics-related issues
There is still a lot of scepticism with AI in Ghana and Africa as a whole. This particular problem even still exists in many parts of the world where AI and its applications are fully developed. Many people present AI as the technology to eventually automate every aspect of human routine.
However, in real life there are many lifesaving situations where we just naturally don’t trust AI to be in full control. A large group of people in Ghana even think that AI may take their jobs, especially given the present lack of jobs in the country and low computer literacy level among the workforce. For these reasons, some of the AI initiatives are not supported by the citizens.
On the issue of AI ethics – which basically refers to a broad collection of considerations for responsible AI that combines safety, security, human concerns and environmental considerations – many of the stakeholders, business leaders and citizens of Ghana do not fully believe that AI is truly safe and fair. This belief is partly true, as there are much research evidence that points to the fact many of the data used to train some of these AI systems do not fairly represent the use-cases in Ghana and Africa.
Also, the environment in which some of these AI algorithms are trained vary differently from our African environment; hence, some of these concerns are legit. However, it seems as though we use these reasons to shy-away from embracing the technology instead of learning more and building our own, putting the right measures in place to mitigate these challenges.
In spite of the challenges, I believe we, the people of Ghana, can do more to unleash the benefits of AI. The benefits that this will bring in the public administration, agriculture, healthcare, banking & finance and retail sectors of Ghana definitely far outweigh the resource investments needed to make it work. Below, I share my thoughts on some of the major things we can do as leaders and people of Ghana to reap the full advantages of this revolution.
- Government leadership involvement
Governmental leaders can fully support AI initiatives in many different ways. First, by having a fully functional directorate or a programme under a related directorate to learn more about AI and how it can benefit the country, create awareness in the citizenry and build capacity by partnering with local and international organisations. Creating an AI policy framework and supporting infrastructure will also go a long way in creating the right environment for these initiatives to scale. Government can also provide funding to support AI research and local AI start-up companies that are focused on solving local challenges with AI.
- Business stakeholder engagement
AI solutions have added tremendous value to businesses across many industries, but the first step to reaping these benefits is having business leaders that are eager and curious to learn about the technology, the value it brings, and to adopt them in their businesses. A lot of start-ups can solve business problems with AI, but without full buy-in from stakeholders it will be difficult to even test these solutions and fully implement them. Stakeholder engagement and support is also needed to ensure that businesses are collecting, extracting and storing data, as well as having systems that are foundational for any successful AI implementation.
- Training and Education
We need to develop local expertise through our educational and training institutions in order to reap the full benefits of AI. Most of our educational systems and contents are still very theoretical and lack modern and practical problem-solving components to prepare the next generation of AI engineers to solve our problems. University professors can invite industry practitioners to contribute certain course content and educational reforms which enable our students to solve practical problems while building rigorous theoretical foundations.
- Industry-academia partnerships
This is related to the above point, but I think merits its own section. University professors need to collaborate with businesses to allow students – particularly in Data Science-related fields – to gain practical experience through either internships or end-to-end business projects wherein the students work with business stakeholders to understand the business problems, gather requirements, collect and organise real-life business data, create Data Science/AI solutions where applicable to solve the business problem, measure the real impact of these solutions if implemented, and communicate results back to stakeholders.
By doing so, students will be exposed to the realities of problem-solving beyond the textbooks. Additionally, university departments can set up a collaborative ‘Centre of Data Science/AI Consulting’ aimed at providing services to corporate businesses, and employ students to work in those centres to gain practical experience. This arrangement is very common at most universities in the United States.
- Funding for local AI start-ups
Most of the innovative AI-powered solutions came out of start-up companies. In order for Ghana to reap the benefits of AI, we must invest in local start-ups that are solving major local challenges. This funding can come from government, established businesses, financial institutions, venture capitalists, angel investors and many other sources. In addition to the funding, these start-ups also need mentoring support from established technology leaders for them to be enabled in building and scaling their solutions.
Let me conclude by saying that data and AI hold a lot of promise for the entire world, and Ghana is not an exception. However, we need to be intentional and set ourselves up to reap the full benefits.
To learn more about Data Science and AI in Ghana, please join our upcoming Ghana Data Science Summit 2022 (IndabaX Ghana), scheduled to happen from the 21st to 23rd September 2022 at the Academic City University College in Accra as well as being hosted online. This event will feature various renowned international speakers from all over the world, and will cover foundational, intermediate and advanced concepts in machine learning and AI, as well as practical applications in the agricultural, health and other business domains. This will be a hybrid event, so you can also join from the comfort of your homes. Visit https://www.indabaxghana.com/ for more info.
>>>the writer is a Snr. Data Science Lead, Shopify, USA. He is also the Founder, Wave-2 Analytics and Cofounder and President, Ghana Data Science Summit https://www.linkedin.com/in/delaliagbenyegah/
