TGHNHASH (Hub for Artificial Intelligence in Maternal, Sexual and Reproductive Health) is a consortium consisting of:

Formed through funding from the IDRC and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), The Hub for Artificial Intelligence in Maternal, Sexual and Reproductive Health (HASH) has been engaging in the AI for MSRH space since 2021, with the objective of implementing a research hub to advance MSRH and rights while strengthening health systems in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) through the responsible development and deployment of AI innovations.

HASH has supported the research and development efforts of ten local African innovators from seven African countries through our subgrantee program. These innovators have developed four chatbots, four predictive analytics tools, and two image analysis algorithms, as showcased in their impact videos.

HASH has also established the HASH Network with its Strategic Plan set to launch at the AI in Health Africa Conference as a platform for community, collaboration, and learning, operating under a co-governance model with our subgrantees. As part of this initiative, five member-led clubs have emerged and now host regular events focused on shared areas of interest.

Through its own work, HASH has also worked to amplify the voices of communities provided examples of community-centred work e.g. a parallel text corpus, SALT, for machine translation speech to text for 5 Ugandan Languages; and work towards delivering an open access, contextualised, accurate STI question-and-answer African context pair dataset to support validation of MSRH conversational assistant through its widely advertised crowdsourcing initiative.

Now in its Phase 2, HASH received funding from International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and UK International Development (FCDO) to undertake a project titled ‘AI4D-FCDO Innovation: Scaling and sustaining AI solutions to improve sexual, reproductive and maternal health in Sub Saharan Africa. This project aims catalyse the development and scale of Responsible AI solutions that address maternal, sexual and reproductive health challenges in SSA.

AI4GH project

The AI4GH project aims to advance maternal, sexual, and reproductive health and rights while strengthening health systems in sub-Saharan Africa through responsible development and deployment of AI innovations.

Specific Objectives

  1. To identify and scale existing phase 1 AI innovations in maternal, sexual and reproductive health in four African countries.
  2. To strengthen capacity amongst AI for health innovators to create solutions for local MSRH priorities based on large datasets.
  3. To sustainably expand the influence of the HASH Network and position it as a centre of excellence for AI and MSRH

Publications & Resources

The crowdsourcing protocol: https://doi.org/10.2196/70005