African countries win the race against time with testing laboratories.

But Africa is recovering. Countries have started to develop testing laboratories. Strongly supported by the African Development Bank, they have achieved logistical and scientific achievements.

Immediately after the pandemic began, the Bank provided $2 million in emergency assistance to help the World Health Organization strengthen its capacity to support African countries. Since March last year, the Bank has been helping countries cope with health emergencies and the socio-economic consequences of the pandemic, notably through the Covid-19 Response Facility of up to $10 billion.

almost any African country can test their population. Some of them even have laboratories efficient enough to handle the genetic sequence of the virus.

After a few months, African countries, having few diagnostic tools, set up two, ten or more laboratories, depending on their geographic and demographic characteristics. South Africa, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria quickly distinguished themselves in the number of daily tests, thanks to the growing number of laboratories operating.

Atsuko Toda of the African Development Bank said this development gave the continent a major victory against the outbreak. “The challenge for African countries is to control contamination but also to relax restrictive measures to allow economies to reopen because a long-term extension of containment measures risks creating economic and social devastation,” said Toda, Acting Vice President of Agriculture, Human and Social Development.

Detect viruses, race against time

Early detection has played a role in limiting the spread of the virus and has helped countries track, isolate and treat confirmed cases.

When the first contamination case was announced on March 11, 2020, Ivory Coast did not have a laboratory to detect the coronavirus; now have about 10.

In Burkina Faso, which initially transported its samples to Dakar, the number of screening laboratories has increased from 7 to 18, thanks to the support of development partners, including the African Development Bank. Test results are now available within 48 hours.

The Nigeria Center for Disease Control has set up testing centers across Africa’s most populous country to detect individual cases.

In Kenya, machines originally intended to test for HIV, tuberculosis or bird flu, were switched to detecting Covid-19, before the arrival of new machines acquired by the government.

According to statistics collected in March 2021 by the African Development Bank’s Business Development, Integration and Delivery Complex (RDVP), the number of analytical laboratories in Malawi has increased tenfold from 14 to 164 and 2.5 in Ethiopia to 66; in the Central African Republic, five new screening laboratories have been established.

The results are huge. South Africa increased the number of daily screenings sevenfold from 5,000 to 35,000, Ethiopia (3,000 to 12,400) and Burkina Faso (268 to 1,160).

Nouridine Kane, African Development Bank representative in Niger, recently praised the Bank’s support for this fragile Sahel nation because, “the Bank’s support has helped strengthen Niger’s capacity to respond more effectively to pandemics and future public health shocks.”

In total, according to the Bank’s RDVP, the support of the Bank and other partners has increased the daily testing capacity of African countries from 13,200 at the start of the epidemic to 105,000; 100,000 health workers have been trained and 314 intensive care units are now available for Covid-19 patients, compared to an average of 50 at the start of the disease.

“It’s a race against time, a landslide victory. Now we have to win the war against the coronavirus,” said Toda. “We started almost from scratch. When we look at the progress made over the past few months, we realize we have come a long way.”

The Democratization of Machine Learning: Here’s how Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD) Africa impacted (almost) the whole continent

AMLD Africa (https://bit.ly/3AvIECg), a free Machine Learning conference, makes it possible for anyone in Africa to learn about AI with world-class speakers and entities.

15.7 trillion US$. This is the expected contribution of Artificial Intelligence to the global economy by 2030 according to PwC’s report “Sizing the Price” (https://pwc.to/3R8JFY4). Here’s how Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD) Africa is offering free access to high-quality education around AI to democratize AI in Africa, and ultimately, contribute to making sure Africa has a fair share of “the Price”.

The more African can learn, grasp, and be inspired by AI, the more existing projects (or new ones) will leverage data to create a social, economic, and cultural value in local environments. It is with the same ambitious vision that AMLD Africa’s second edition will present AI through an African Lens from the 3rd to the 5th of November at the prestigious Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) in Ben Guerir, Morocco.

AMLD Africa is a 3-day conference that consists of both inspiring talks and instructive workshops. Speakers will have an opportunity to inspire African talents, teach those who would like to improve their technical skills and strengthen the African Data Science community such as Zindi. Consequently, AMLD Africa’s conference will embody its motto: Democratizing Machine Learning in Africa.

For their first edition, AMLD Africa was able to present a truly comprehensive platform that included academics from Stanford, the University of the Western Cape and EPFL, corporates from IBM, Google, entrepreneurs and even the Assistant Director of the UNESCO. 3000 participants from all over the continent (50 African countries) were able to contemplate a true picture of AI, a picture where every entity was able to add its colour to make the whole as accurate as possible. If you too are a motivated and passionate AI enthusiast, you can embellish this year’s painting by clicking here (https://bit.ly/3R60MKl) to apply for a talk or a workshop.

When asked on how to retain talent in the african continent: "It is a matter of identifying important problems, and having the opportunity and tools to solve them. Furthermore, the increase of start-ups creates a dynamic and go-ahead environment for machine learning engineers and researches. If we manage to create such an ecosystem, we will be able to bring change, through solving long lasting problems." A future of Shared AI Knowledge, Opening Keynote, Moustapha Cisse - Head of the Google AI Center in Accra, Ghana.

AMLD Africa not only includes both entities and individuals, but also has a cross-industry approach. Since AI is impacting every sector - finance, national security, healthcare, etc. - of private and public life, AMLD Africa presents the talks within tracks: Healthcare, agriculture and even entertainment for example. Whether it is “Detecting cervical cancer with a smartphone-based solution”, “Measuring and optimizing agricultural production using aerial imagery” or even music generated by AI (that you can listen to in the video below), the talks tackle actual challenges and conveyed the idea that technology is not a goal itself, but rather a tool for the minds and sometimes the ears.

https://bit.ly/3CKT4AQ

AI has a lot of ethical, social, and economic challenges, but these challenges come with an undeniable opportunity to leapfrog the technological infrastructure associated with the Third Industrial Revolution. It is only when we give the young, motivated and passionate talents easy access to technology, that more initiatives will leverage data, and that AI could benefit daily life. If you are wondering how that can do, then AMLD Africa is the conference to attend.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of AMLD Africa.