Tackling the Healthcare Expertise Gap with AI
Kenya faces a critical healthcare challenge: just 10,000 doctors serve a population of over 52 million. In many rural and peri-urban clinics, junior doctors must make complex medical decisions without access to senior mentorship or specialist support. This often leads to delayed diagnoses, suboptimal treatments, and inconsistent adherence to evolving clinical guidelines. At the same time, valuable local research and clinical guidelines can take up to a decade to be translated into everyday clinical practice.
The Afya Gemma Solution
Afya Gemma is an AI-powered clinical decision support platform purpose-built to improve patient outcomes across Kenya. It provides real-time, evidence-based guidance to clinicians through a natural language interface—available in both English and Kiswahili—making it intuitive and accessible at every level of care.
Built for Kenya’s Health System, Afya Gemma combines three powerful, locally grounded data sources:
Over a decade of anonymized patient data, offering deep insights into health trends across Kenya’s diverse populations.
Evidence-based protocols tailored for low- and middle-income settings, ensuring relevance to the Kenyan context.
A curated collection of local research addressing prevalent diseases and health system challenges in Kenya. Together, these sources empower clinicians to make fast, informed decisions aligned with both global best practices and local realities.
What makes it different
- Built for Kenya with Kenya data.
- Multilingual (supports English and Swahili).
- Low compute footprint (runs on consumer-grade devices).
- Validated by clinicians for safety and realiability.
- Scalable across geographies and specialities.
Driving Impact Across the Country
Afya Gemma will be deployed throughout the Aga Khan University Hospital and Aga Khan Health Services network, reaching 40 clinics across urban, peri-urban, and underserved rural areas. By equipping healthcare providers with AI-driven insights, the platform aims to:
Close the knowledge-to-practice gap
Strengthen frontline clinical decision-making
Enhance access to quality care in low-resource settings
Learn more about Afya Gemma
Afya Gemma was selected as one of 20 global projects and one of only 5 operating in Sub-Saharan Africa to join the 2025 Google.org Generative AI Accelerator:
