Prize awarded to African students for creating offline system
Happy Niyorurema and Mame Niang at The World Government Summit in Dubai (via Africa Press)
Two African students won a global prize in a Dubai summit for developing a system that uses AI to deliver academic content through phone calls, negating the need for smartphones, Africanews reported on February 5th.
Students Happy Niyorurema and Mame Niang from Texas Christian University aim to tackle the lack of access to education in areas where populations remain largely offline. This innovation of using AI in education was awarded the Global Best M-Gov Award at The World Government Summit in Dubai.
The summit brings together governments and representatives to discuss innovation and technology, and ways to improve public services. This year’s summit brought together 150 governments, 500 ministers, and over 60 heads of state and government.
The system created by the students gives learners access to educational resources via standard phone calls. “When we talk about AI, we often assume people are online and able to use it. But there are 2.9 billion people, most of them in the Global South, who still lack internet access – that’s just over one-third of the world’s population. We built our own AI (large language model), but instead of putting it on the web, we deployed it on telephony,” said Niyorurema.
The digital divide means that many remote areas are left without internet access due to a lack of infrastructure. According to data, in low-income countries only 27% of the population has access to the internet, whereas in lower-middle-income countries only 53% have access. This presents a contrast with upper-middle and high-income countries, in which 80% and 93% of the population have access to the internet, respectively.
“It’s extremely easy to use – you don’t need a smartphone. I think this solution is innovative because we tend to assume people have access to smartphones and the internet. But with this, you can use even the most basic phone. We’ve already started our pilot programme in Rwanda, and we’re planning to expand across Africa, starting with Senegal, Zambia and other countries on the continent,” Niang said.
Meanwhile, in Africa, digital inclusion is being accelerated through Satellite internet services like SpaceX. Yet the gaps still exist and take years of investment to improve.
Africanews, Gulf News, Italian Institute for International Political Studies, Maghrebi.org
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