Africa innovates Magazine -AI4DEV - Flipbook - Page 57
It is crooked wood that
shows the best sculptor.
African Proverb
Our mid-term goal is to make ASSA
a comprehensive telemedicine tool,
photo: Shutterstock.com
and in the long term a tool to
support clinical medical research
and public health.
W H AT D I F F I C U LT I E S H AV E
BEEN ENCOUNTERED?
W H AT S U P P O RT D O YO U N E E D
TO S C A L E U P A S S A ?
The biggest challenge was convincing the Ministry to
accept our platform. They originally thought we would
just be adding more to their workload. However, this was
quickly resolved when they realized how much the ASSA
platform speeds up and makes their work easier. However,
we had to deal with managing patchy and often inconsistent data, and this had to be handled so that we didn’t
import biased data into the ASSA database.
The second challenge was training the chatbot in our
national languages. Chatbot engines don’t cover our
languages. We had to do it all ourselves. It was also difficult to get the mobile app accepted by App Stores, who
consider the functions of our platforms to be a breach
of their policies. In addition, the use of the Ministry of
Health logo requires a special certificate.
We need to expand our development team and processing capacity. Of course, this requires significant financial
resources and time. We also want to increase ASSA’s
linguistic capacity and improve our artificial intelligence
engine so that it can cover all of the national languages
in West Africa.
We need support from partners like UNDP to support not
only Mali but also all the other countries going through
similar situations. Our mid-term goal is to make ASSA a
comprehensive telemedicine tool, and in the long term
a tool to support clinical medical research and public
health. Using artificial intelligence, ASSA could assist with
research and development for new vaccines, as well.
SHOWCASING AFRICAN INNOVATION 57
