Over the past three months, DPE has been part of the Kenyan chapter of the Llama Impact Accelerator, an initiative designed to drive innovation and real-world impact through open-source AI in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Llama Impact Accelerator Program supports startups building and scaling solutions powered by Llama models, helping them turn responsible AI into tools that improve lives. The program features a 6-week incubation phase of technical training, business workshops, and mentorship, followed by six months of post-program support to strengthen community, refine products, and accelerate deployment.
The accelerator currently runs in Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa, each serving as a hub for emerging AI innovation across the continent.
For DPE, participation in the Kenyan chapter offered an invaluable opportunity to demonstrate how context-aware AI can strengthen trust and connection in healthcare. We showcased our approach to designing human-centered AI systems that make health communication more responsive, ensuring that people, not just data, remain at the center of every decision.
That journey reached a major milestone on October 22, 2025, when DPE was named one of the winners of the Llama Impact Accelerator Demo Day in Nairobi, receiving a $25,000 equity-free award for our work in responsible, locally grounded AI for health.
“Winning the Llama Impact Accelerator is not just validation, it’s fuel. We’re building Africa’s trusted AI layer for health engagement.”
~ DPE leadership team
The recognition celebrates the work of African innovators designing AI that listens before it speaks – technology that understands local languages, values, and realities before offering guidance. It also underscores a growing shift: that the future of global AI will be shaped not only in Silicon Valley, but in Africa.
And now, our next chapter begins. DPE will now represent Kenya at the AI Summit 2025 in Dubai, UAE, taking place on Tuesday, November 4, 2025. As one of the accelerator winners, we’ll pitch alongside innovators from across Africa, the Middle East, and Türkiye (AMET) during the Pre-Summit Event on Monday, November 3, 2025, a gathering of government leaders, industry experts, academics, and creators shaping the future of Artificial Intelligence across the region.
Our work with the InfoAFYA-8B model, fine-tuned on the Llama architecture, continues to demonstrate what’s possible when AI is trained with empathy and context in mind.
This milestone was made possible through the early support of the Grand Challenges Africa & SFA Foundation, whose partnership enabled DPE and other African innovators to safely experiment with open, responsible, community-driven AI.
As we move forward, resources and mentorship from the Llama Impact Accelerator will allow us to continue developing the model, strengthening its multilingual capability, improving context sensitivity, and expanding its use across African health systems.
You can explore the current version of the model in Hugging Face, and the solutions it enables such as InfoAFYA.
We’re grateful to the mentors, partners, and peers who made the past three months such a defining experience, and to everyone championing responsible AI across Africa.
(Tags: #LlamaImpactAccelerator #AIforGood #DigitalHealth #DPEKenya #AISummitDubai #AfricaInnovation #AIImpact)