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Jacaranda Health is a Kenya-based non-profit that aims to improve quality of care and outcomes for mothers and babies in the public health system. It partners with local and national governments to deploy a proven package of scalable solutions that support new and expecting mothers, their babies, and the nurses that serve them. Jacaranda’s solutions have reached 2.8 million new and expecting mothers across 22 of Kenya’s busiest counties, and are currently being tested for scale within two government-partnered pilot projects in Ghana and Eswatini.

Jacaranda Health AI Projects

Jacaranda is committed to advancing the field of AI to reach and support underserved mothers at scale, while ensuring its models are safe, responsible, and human-centered. Their digital health platform PROMPTS is powered by sophisticated machine learning models that help respond to women and triage them for pregnancy or postpartum-related risk. Over five years, Jacaranda has made significant strides in improving the performance of these models to enhance the speed, efficiency, and contextual relevance of its interactions with mothers on PROMPTS, and expand AI-driven support for underserved populations.

Some success stories include:

    • UlizaLlama – launched the world’s first customizable, open-source Large Language Model trained to read and respond to information in fluent Swahili. It’s being incorporated into PROMPTS for nuanced, accurate Swahili support and will expand over time to other Sub-Saharan African languages (e.g., Amharic, Afrikaans) and to partner implementers in finance, education, and agriculture.
    • AI-driven risk screening – PROMPTS already identifies immediate danger signs (e.g., heavy bleeding) in mothers’ messages. Jacaranda has also developed algorithms to collect clinical, environmental, and conversational data at scale, building individualized risk profiles to trigger personalized messaging and proactive outreach to high-risk mothers via the helpdesk.

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. Identifying, validating, and documenting priority research sub-themes at the intersections of AI and maternal, sexual, and reproductive health and rights, and health systems strengthening in SSA.
  2. Strengthening the capacity of African innovators, researchers, and policymakers to support responsible AI applications.
  3. Increasing and strengthening the number of homegrown AI innovations to develop, deploy, and scale responsible AI applications aimed at improving maternal, sexual, and reproductive health and rights while informing a wide audience including the general public.

Resources & Events

Ongoing Projects