AI empowering women to fight diseases

It is just a piece of paper, but for Diana Jelagot, a diploma in Artificial Intelligence (AI) means a lot.

“The training has been so empowering,” she said right after her graduation at Kabarak University.

The 23-year-old finance student from Baringo County is one of the 90 participants of a pioneer machine-learning programme called Enabling Girls in Artificial Intelligence and Growing Expertise (ENGAGE).

The programme aims at training young women from less privileged backgrounds to utilise AI to solve problems in public health. 

Before the programme, Jelagot did not know anything about coding. “The python programme is not easy and I didn’t know if I could hack it. But the lecturer said that I needed to take my time. And I did. Getting the data, running the code and trying to predict some diseases has been so amazing,” she said.

Jelagot wants to fight malaria in her county. In analysing the data, she said she can help doctors to find the places that require mosquito nets and resources. The programme inspired the finance student so much that she is now considering doing a post-graduate in data science.

The graduation took place on Friday at Kabarak University, Nakuru County and parallel in five other universities across the country. The University of Nairobi and the University of San Francisco California are also involved in the project among others.

ENGAGE tries to reduce the biases created by men in data science. The field is predominantly male-dominated not only in Kenya, but across the world. 

Henry Kiplangat, Vice Chancellor of Kabarak University, encouraged the young women to believe in themselves. “I believe that this programme has empowered you and provided the needed mentorship to use data to make decisions that will influence public health interventions,” he said.

Eddah Chepchirchir, a 24-year-old from Bomet County is thrilled to in the doctors with data to identify women at risk and to improve maternal health care,” she said.

In the future, she sees herself leading in policy-making, especially in data. “At the moment, it’s a big challenge to obtain data from Kenyan hospitals, but it will be so important in the future,” she noted.

In the next five years of the project, ENGAGE wants to train over 800 girls. “To the young ladies who are eager to join the programme, I would tell them: Go for it!” says Chepchirchir

Next year, the target is not only students from science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), but also girls in secondary schools.

Julius Otieno Oyugi, Director of Research at the University of Nairobi’s Institute of Tropical and Infectious Diseases and the lead researcher of the programme, said “The idea is not to make them professionals in this field, but to create interest in them to choose data science as a career in the future.”