During the Grand Challenges annual event held in Senegal and hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its partners, Bill Gates made a significant announcement. The foundation will allocate $30 million to launch a new artificial intelligence platform in Africa.
The Grand Challenges program, initiated in 2003, represents the foundation’s prominent innovation initiative. It employs open calls for proposals to gather potential solutions and focuses on directing funding and attention toward urgent global health and development issues that affect the world’s most impoverished populations.
The investment in an AI platform is one of the fresh initiatives aimed at supporting Africa-led innovation introduced at this year’s event in Dakar. The platform’s primary goal is to provide technical and operational support to African researchers and entrepreneurs, enabling them to translate their ideas into practical solutions for health and development.
In Bill Gates’ perspective, this is a significant step toward ensuring that the advantages of artificial intelligence are applicable, affordable, and accessible to everyone, particularly those in low- and middle-income countries. It also underscores the importance of creating critical technologies in a secure, ethical, and equitable manner.
To expand the platform and seek collaboration opportunities related to AI in health and development, the foundation will continue working closely with technical partners and governments.
The foundation has emphasized that the investments made at the event come with a pressing call for nations to increase funding for the acceleration and simplification of research and development (R&D) in health and development innovation. This will make the latest scientific and technological advances accessible to all.
While funding for health R&D is on the rise, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pointed out that only 2% of these funds are directed toward diseases that primarily affect the world’s most impoverished populations. Gates has called for a commitment of at least $3 billion more each year in global health and development R&D to address the significant funding gaps for neglected diseases.
Moussa Balde, Senegal’s Minister of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation, noted that global investments in an innovative solutions pipeline have helped reduce childhood mortality by half over the past two decades. However, he also highlighted that life-saving inventions often take too long to reach those in need and are not consistently developed with equity in mind.
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