By Business Express Reporter
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is steadily transforming Kenya’s healthcare landscape, offering doctors powerful tools to navigate complex clinical decisions and elevate the quality of patient care.
Across rural and peri-urban health facilities, junior doctors frequently make critical medical decisions without access to senior specialists or mentors. This gap often results in delayed diagnoses, suboptimal treatment plans, and inconsistent adherence to clinical protocols. Increasingly, however, AI-driven solutions are helping to bridge that divide.
Modern AI systems can analyse patient histories, medical imaging, and other clinical data to identify patterns linked to specific illnesses. By doing so, they enable quicker and more precise diagnoses, facilitate earlier interventions, and ultimately improve patient outcomes.
While some healthcare professionals remain cautious—arguing that clinical intuition and hands-on experience cannot be replaced—AI is proving its value as a complementary tool rather than a substitute for doctors. Concerns around accuracy, reliability, and ethical use persist, but the technology’s supportive role continues to gain acceptance.
The need for innovation is pressing. Kenya has approximately 10,000 doctors serving a population exceeding 52 million, highlighting a significant workforce shortage. In response to this challenge, the Aga Khan University Data Innovation Office has developed Afya Gema, an AI-powered clinical decision support platform aimed at strengthening frontline care.
Farhana Alarakhiya, Chief Data Innovation Officer at Aga Khan University and Principal Investigator for Afya Gema, explains that the platform simplifies complex clinical questions by combining evidence-based medicine with locally relevant guidance. She notes that generative AI enables broader access to clinical knowledge, putting critical information directly into the hands of healthcare workers.
Afya Gema’s impact has already earned global recognition. The platform was selected for the Google.org Accelerator 2025 cohort, a programme supporting the use of generative AI in the social sector. Participation provides access to funding from a $30 million pool, technical training, Google Cloud infrastructure, and hands-on mentorship from Google specialists.
With this support, Afya Gema is scaling its operations nationwide. The platform draws on anonymised data from Kenya’s Electronic Health Record system, incorporates local clinical guidelines, and links to peer-reviewed medical research. It is accessible in both English and Swahili, ensuring usability even in remote settings.
The system is already operational in 40 facilities within the Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) and Aga Khan Health Services (AKHS) networks. Its multilingual interface and locally contextualised insights enable healthcare providers across diverse regions to use it effectively.
Behind the initiative is the Aga Khan University Data Innovation Office, which collaborates with clinicians, researchers, and policymakers to design scalable, data-driven healthcare solutions. Its mission is to enhance service delivery and inform evidence-based policy, demonstrating how technology tailored to local realities can advance equitable and sustainable health outcomes.
As AI becomes more deeply integrated into Kenya’s healthcare system, the key question is no longer whether it will reshape medical practice—but how swiftly and profoundly it will redefine the future of care.
