Yesterday, at the Grand Challenges annual event hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its partners in Senegal, Bill Gates announced that the foundation will invest $30 million in a new artificial intelligence platform in Africa.
Launched in 2003, Grand Challenges is the foundation’s signature innovation program. It uses open calls for proposals to crowdsource potential solutions and concentrates financing and attention on pressing global health and development concerns affecting the world’s poorest people.
An investment in an AI platform was among the new initiatives to support Africa-led innovation presented at this year’s event in Dakar. The platform will offer technical and operational support to African researchers and entrepreneurs so they may transform their ideas into workable solutions for health and development.
It is a step in the right direction, in Gates’ opinion, towards ensuring that the benefits of artificial intelligence are applicable, affordable, and available to everyone, especially those in low- and middle-income nations, and that crucial technologies are created in a secure, moral and fairly manner.
To grow the platform and look for opportunities to work together on AI for health and development, the foundation will continue to work closely with technical partners and governments.
The foundation claims that the investments made at the meeting come with a pressing plea for nations to increase funding to accelerate and simplify health and development innovation research and development (R&D) and make the newest scientific and technological advancements applicable to everyone.
Even if funding for health research and development as a whole is rising, according to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, just 2% of such cash is allocated to diseases that impact the world’s poorest people.
Gates called for the world to spend at least $3 billion more on global health and development R&D each year to close significant funding shortages for neglected illnesses.
“New health technologies have the potential to save millions of lives, but R&D funding is going in the wrong direction,” he said. “Donors need to step up their commitments to ensure health innovations reach those who need them more quickly, so more lives can be saved.”
“Global investments in a pipeline of innovative solutions helped reduce childhood deaths under five by half over the past two decades,” noted Moussa Balde, Senegal’s Minister of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation.
However, the minister noted that it still takes too long for life-saving inventions to get to those who need them, and they are not always created with fairness in mind.
