Earlier this year (2025) in April, DPE joined the Grand Challenges AI Community Convening and the Global AI Summit on Africa, two landmark gatherings that continue to influence how we approach AI for health today. Many of the reflections shared here have since guided our work through the Llama Impact Accelerator and the continued development of our AI powered behavior change model.
The Grand Challenges AI Community Convening – Kigali, April 2 – 3 2025
In April 2025, our team at DPE had the opportunity to join over 180 innovators, researchers, and funders in Kigali for the inaugural Grand Challenges AI Community Convening.
Hosted by the Gates Foundation, the event brought together 120+ community members, 30+ Gates Foundation representatives, and 30+ partner organizations working at the intersection of AI and social impact.
The convening had three clear objectives:
- Connect: bring together AI Grand Challenge awardees (2023 & 2024) with thought partners and experts.
- Explore: surface shared challenges and opportunities shaping the future of AI for good.
- Showcase: highlight community achievements and emerging AI solutions improving lives.
Over two days, we engaged in discussions around five central themes: Defining sustainable pathways to scale, Navigating ethical considerations from validation to scale, Addressing challenges in low-resource language environments, Attracting and retaining users and Building and maintaining multidisciplinary teams.
For DPE, it was both grounding and inspiring.
“This convening reminded us that building inclusive AI starts with language. We realized we must sharpen our focus on low-resource language support ~ especially for Swahili and other regional languages, if our AI models are to truly understand and serve African users.”
The conversations also prompted us to leverage shared community resources datasets, evaluation frameworks, and peer networks, to strengthen the linguistic and ethical foundations of our AI models.
The Global AI Summit on Africa 2025 from April 3rd to 4th 2025
Immediately following the convening, we participated in the Global AI Summit on Africa (GAIS Africa 2025) – organized by C4IR Rwanda, the Government of Rwanda, and international partners.
Under the theme “Harnessing AI for Africa’s Sustainable Future,” the summit gathered policymakers, industry leaders, and innovators to align on how AI can accelerate equitable development across the continent.
Key sessions explored:
- Responsible AI governance and policy coordination across Africa.
- AI for health, education, and climate adaptation – real use cases from African organizations.
- Infrastructure and investment for AI – building capacity for data and compute access.
- Localization of large language models (LLMs) – the importance of African-led datasets and open-source collaboration.
For DPE, GAIS Africa was a powerful complement to the Grand Challenges sessions, bridging technical innovation with policy dialogue. It reinforced our belief that AI for Africa must be locally built, linguistically inclusive, and governed with community insight.
Looking Ahead – From Kigali to Today
These April events were pivotal in shaping DPE’s AI journey through 2025. They helped us refocus our efforts on:
- Deepening research on Swahili and other low-resource languages,
- Strengthening ethical and human-centered frameworks for our AI development, and
- Actively participating in the regional AI community of practice for social impact.
We’ve found that participating in such global and regional summits doesn’t just expand our networks, it accelerates our R&D learning loop. Each conversation with peers, funders, and technical experts sharpens our understanding of where innovation is most needed, and how we can build intellectual property that reflects African realities while remaining globally relevant.
These insights now inform our ongoing collaboration through the Llama Impact Accelerator and our continued refinement of the InfoAFYA-8B model.
As we continue developing the model, resources and mentorship from the Llama Impact Accelerator will help us enhance multilingual performance, contextual reasoning, and ethical safeguards. This journey builds upon the early support of the Grand Challenges, which made our first phase of experimentation with responsible, open-source AI possible.
From Kigali to today, we remain guided by the same conviction: the most powerful AI innovations are those that understand people first.
#GAISAfrica2025 #GrandChallengesAI #AIforGood #DigitalHealth #DPEKenya #AIinAfrica #ResponsibleAI #LlamaImpactAccelerator