“It has to touch the lives of people”: the Gates Foundation’s challenge to Africa’s AI builders

Africa’s artificial intelligence developers should measure success by improvements in healthcare, education and incomes rather than the number of products they launch, the Gates Foundation’s Nigeria director told Moonshot by TechCabal in Lagos.

Uche Amaonwu said AI could widen access to knowledge, services and economic opportunity, but warned that its benefits would depend on deliberate choices about how the technology was developed, financed and deployed.

“For a technology to really be impactful, it has to touch the lives of people,” he said during a keynote address.

His remarks set out a challenge for developers and investors seeking applications for AI across the continent: moving promising tools beyond trials and into the institutions and communities expected to use them.

Amaonwu pointed to the foundation’s Goalkeepers report on AI and equity, released around the UN General Assembly, describing its message as “exciting, but also cautionary”. AI could become “a powerful equaliser”, he said, but that outcome was far from assured.

“If we are not deliberate about how AI is developed and deployed, we could end up widening the very inequalities that we’re actually trying to close.”

The foundation’s approach, he said, starts with three objectives: preventing avoidable maternal and child deaths, protecting the next generation from deadly infectious diseases, and helping hundreds of millions of people escape poverty.

These were “human condition goals”, he said. AI’s value would lie in whether it accelerated progress towards them.

A central part of that effort is the Nigeria AI Scaling Hub, hosted by Lagos Business School in partnership with the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy. Backed by up to $7.5mn from the foundation over three years, the hub aims to expand the use of proven AI tools in health, agriculture and education.

Its focus is the difficult transition from a successful pilot to sustained adoption. A tool that works in a trial still needs infrastructure, institutional support and a viable funding model before it can reach people consistently.

Amaonwu identified four requirements for making that transition.

Developers needed shared infrastructure, including connectivity, trusted data, and systems capable of exchanging information, so that each company did not have to build the same foundations independently.

Tools also needed to reflect Nigerian conditions and languages, earn users’ trust from the outset, and have a clear route to adoption and payment. Identifying who would use a product — and who would finance its continued use — was as important as developing it.

The argument places responsibility beyond technology companies. Governments shape the conditions for adoption through regulation and public systems, while investors determine which businesses receive the capital to expand.

Amaonwu urged the Moonshot audience to return the following year with evidence of practical results like clinics where patients had received care, classrooms where children had caught up, and farmers who had secured better prices for their harvests.

“No one in this room can do all of this alone,” he said. The future worth building was “the one that we must build together”.