Artificial intelligence (AI). When people think of this word, most probably thinks of the scenes in movies and science fiction, however, in reality, Artificial Intelligence (AI) vastly applies to daily life from language translation on Google, to virtual assistants. Besides a better population of Africa, continent had no simple understanding of what Artificial Intelligence is, until when Google opened its very first center of Artificial intelligence in Accra Ghana, in line with its vision and desire of being the competent center of research in the world. The primary goal of opening the center in Africa was to provide the new skills, technology and the fundamental research needed by the developers to create and build products that would meet the African needs, therefore solving the many problems across all sectors including; health, education, and agriculture.
The majority of artificial intelligence hubs and experts are based in Asia, Europe, and North America, with minimal representation in Africa. Therefore, the new AI center in Accra Ghana is set to bring a huge impact to the continent, given that the lack of diversity in Africa can build discrimination into Artificial Intelligence products, or even cause unwanted algorithmic biases. For many decades, the deficit in AI talents, engineers and researcher’s representation has resulted in less knowledge of Africa’s specific problems and fewer opportunities to utilize AI to change the African lives (Chapi, 2017). A.I is a very significant tool used daily to accelerate all aspects of science in engineering, chemistry, and physics, however, most people advancing and working with science were mainly based in western countries, a big hindrance for Africa development.
The Accra artificial intelligence hub will be of much benefit to the African continent and probably the game changer for Africa. First, the lab will gather all machine learning engineers and researchers in Africa to influence the development and solve the many challenges in the economy, particularly in agriculture, health and education. Secondly, the AI center will work hand in hand with researchers in African centers of learning, mostly the universities by giving grants to a potential and interested individual in different fields of AI through providing scholarships for Ph.D. Thirdly the Accra lab is set to collaborate and work with other institution in the continent since the center is already international and will provide a good platform for many international countries to work with African institutions.
Speaking of agriculture, AI will try to find several ways to help the farmers address the major problems they encounter. For instance, the team at AI lab is focused to integrate technology in Tanzania that is already in existence. The integrated technology will far much help the farmers to establish all diseases in crops by taking a photo and upload to an app that ill recommends a necessary solution (Saddier, et al 2016). The app will be designed to work even when offline to help those farmers in rural areas to ensure food security.
The Accra AI center will also make use of AI to help improve quality healthcare, not just for human care but also plants (Akogo, 2019). This will be important for food security since most African regions have a challenge in crop diseases which is a threat to food security. The AI lab will have many researchers working to improve the diagnosis of different crop diseases.
Conclusively, the Accra Ghana, AI lab will help rise Africa to international standards. Most of the work by AI is set to be designed on a powerful machine, although this is a major challenge for Africa where the majority are not in access to the internet and lack sophisticated phones for internet, The Accra center will design measure to address these problems.
