session at the World Economic Forum (WEF)<\/a> in Davos on Wednesday.<\/p>\nStarting with Rwanda\u00a0<\/p>\n
The pilot will start in Rwanda, and later branch out to Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria, Gates added.<\/p>\n
Rwanda is already exploring the use of AI to help health workers with disease diagnosis, relieve them of onerous administrative tasks, and model the trajectory of diseases.<\/p>\n
Paula Ingabire, Rwanda\u2019s Minister of Information, Communication and Technology and Innovation, told the WEF that her country has been working on technological solutions for its \u201cpain points\u201d for over two decades.<\/p>\n
As a start, the country has rolled out internet access to around 97% of its population \u2013 a significant achievement in a country where most people live in rural areas.<\/p>\n
It is currently building \u201csome of the foundational digital infrastructure that is enabling and powering [technological] advancements,\u201d said Ingabire.<\/p>\n
One of Rwanda\u2019s aims is to use AI to create \u201cdecision-support tools\u201d for its 60,000-plus community health workers (CHW) who provide primary healthcare to communities across the country.<\/p>\n
As around 70% of the cases CHW deal with every year are malaria, the country wants an AI tool to help them to improve diagnosis and to better anticipate when and where to expect malaria cases, said Ingabire.<\/p>\n
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Paula Ingabire, Rwanda\u2019s Minister of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) and Innovation.<\/p>\n
Rwanda has already used a combination of drones and AI to address malaria \u2013 with the drones pinpointing and spraying mosquito breeding sites and AI helping with the prediction and modelling of the disease.<\/p>\n
Two years ago, Rwanda set itself the goal of quadrupling its health workforce in four years \u2013 something it has already almost achieved.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut they\u2019re going to need these tools to support better care delivery. Some of the administrative tasks that they\u2019ve been working on, we can use AI to do that, so they\u2019re more focused on delivering better and targeted care to our people,\u201d Ingabire said.<\/p>\n
The government also wants to use AI to improve its demand forecasting for health commodities to prevent medicine stockouts.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe started this digital transformation journey more than 15 years ago. We have a lot of data that we\u2019re not using. Building national data intelligence platforms that help us is critical. Once we build these models, they need to be trained on our own data, they need to be context specific, and they need to come in to address real problems.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ingabire added that her country is also in conversation with the AI company Anthropic, which developed the large language model Claude, \u201cto see how we can have an instant health intelligence platform that then feeds into the entire national health planning systems and allows us to allocate better resources\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
AI-based TB screening
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Global Fund CEO Peter Sands<\/p>\n
Peter Sands, CEO of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, told the WEF that the fund has invested $170 million over the past four years in AI-based TB screening.<\/p>\n
This is one of the largest single applications of AI and health, and it is delivering a \u201cvery significant impact\u201d, he added.<\/p>\n
One example of how the Fund has used AI-based TB screening is in refugee camps.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are well over a million Sudanese refugees in Chad, and we set up mobile clinics with the government of Chad to go into these refugee camps and do screening for TB,\u201d said Sands.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As there were no radiologists, \u201cif you want the screening to be interpreted, there is no alternative [but AI]\u201d, he added.<\/p>\n
However, Sands warned that some \u201cvery basic problems\u201d still need to be fixed to enable the rollout of AI-driven solutions \u2013 primarily that many African primary health care facilities lack internet connectivity, and some even lack power.<\/p>\n
He also urged the use of AI to be \u201cframed around problems needing solutions, as opposed to a whole bunch of tools needing a problem to fix\u201d \u2013 akin to people \u201crunning around with a whole lot of hammers looking for nails\u201d.<\/p>\n
He added that tools are easier to develop than finding people \u201cwho can actually use them and make things happen\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Faster progress in LMICs than wealthy countries?
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Gates Foundation CEO Bill Gates<\/p>\n
Gates believes that there may be faster progress with the rollout of AI in healthcare in developing world health than the \u201crich world\u201d because \u201cthe need is so great, and the governments are embracing this and making sure that it\u2019s moving at full speed\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe $50 million commitment is just the beginning. I believe that people in Africa should have this \u2018health advisor\u2019 without having to pay anything for it. It should just be a basic capability available to them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAs you go into the health system, instead of filling out paperwork and redescribing everything, the AI that you\u2019ve been talking to is summarising that\u2026 getting rid of the paperwork together.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sands also believes that low- and middle-income countries could adopt AI tools faster than developed economies, which are more regulated and where AI is more likely to take away jobs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the reasons this may well take off faster in middle-income countries is because there won\u2019t be the resistance from people who say: \u2018This has taken my job\u2019 and \u2018I don\u2019t want to change the way we do things\u2019, because it\u2019s compensating for the fact that those people don\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
Image Credits: Cecille Joan Avila \/ Partners In Health<\/a>.<\/p>\nCombat the infodemic in health information and support health policy reporting from the global South. Our growing network of journalists in Africa, Asia, Geneva and New York connect the dots between regional realities and the big global debates, with evidence-based, open access news and analysis. To make a personal or organisational contribution click here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Community Health Workers attend a training session on HIV prevention in Kirehe, Rwanda. The Gates Foundation and OpenAI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253602,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[163,521,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-253601","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Rwanda_0215_CHW-HIV-Training_CAvila_58-1024x682.jpg\")
Community Health Workers attend a training session on HIV prevention in Kirehe, Rwanda.<\/p>\n