Four Mini-Grant Awardees Announced for Development of AI applications in Kenya

University of Nairobi, University of Johannesburg and UbuntuNet Alliance are partners in a RISA Fund funded project entitled, “Ecosystem Strengthening as a Catalyst for International Collaborative Development of Emerging Digital Technologies (EDT) and X-Data Applications Tackling Socio-Economic Challenges in Kenya and South Africa.“

The one year project seeks to develop a deep understanding of the EDT/X-Data ecosystems; build capacity and support networking of researchers, entrepreneurs, decision-makers and policy-makers; and support multi-disciplinary teams to develop EDT/X-Data based applications. X-Data collectively refers to four overlapping data categories: big data, open data, user-generated data, and real-time data.

After the call for proposals closed and review of submitted applications completed, four teams in Kenya have been selected for the award of mini-grants to develop EDT-based application prototypes using X-data in the areas of Health, Agriculture and Governance. The awardees are:

1. Kirinyaga University: Darubini – A Social Media Hate Speech Detector.
2. Chuka University: TBNet – A LightWeight Convolution Neural Network for Detecting Tuberculosis using X-Ray Images.
3. Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology: A Machine Learning Approach for Estimating Maize Yield Using Bio-Physical Parameters Retrieved from Remote Sensed Dataset.
4. Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute: Enhancing the Use of Electronic Fish Market Information System for Scaling Lake Victoria Fisheries Value Chain for Blue Growth.

More details of the overall project and the awarded mini-grant projects can be found on the project website. Awardees from South Africa shall be announced in April.