As technology promises to revolutionise healthcare access, millions of Kenyans find themselves locked out by language, literacy, and connectivity barriers.
When Grace Wanjiku’s five-year-old daughter developed a high fever at 2 am, the domestic worker from Kawangware did what many mothers in distress would do: she reached for her phone to seek help from a doctor and a nearby pharmacist whose contacts she had saved.
But unlike the tech-savvy professionals in nearby suburbs who might consult ChatGPT or other AI health advisors, Wanjiku faced a different reality.
‘I hear on the radio that people can now use their phones to talk to a doctor computer,’ Wanjiku told the Business Daily, speaking in Kikuyu through a translator. ‘But that is not for people like me. That is for the ones who went to school in English.’
Struggle to fit into shift
Wanjiku represents millions of Kenyans struggling to fit into the shift toward the government’s ambitious healthcare digitisation.
Kenya is also at the forefront in adopting technology to streamline healthcare delivery.
Tiba AI, founded by Flavian Simiyu, a biomedical engineering graduate from the Technical University of Mombasa, offers an AI-powered health platform for patient record management and clinical decision support.
The platform includes a patient portal for uploading paper records and accessing digital medical history-addressing a uniquely Kenyan challenge.
Another one is Antimicro.ai, developed by Kenyan doctors Fredrick Mutisya and Rachael Kanguha, which uses AI to predict antibiotic resistance-a critical issue in a country where over-prescription and misuse of antibiotics are rampant.
Amref Health Africa’s JibuAI aims to expand conversational support for mothers and youth through voice-enabled chatbots, combining clinical data with local context, while IntelliSOFT’s Mama’s Hub, built on Google’s Open Health Stack, empowers patients, community health volunteers, and health systems.
These tools are designed by Kenyans for Kenyan contexts, yet face scaling challenges against foreign tech giants, like the just-launched Horizon1000, an initiative by OpenAI and Bill Gates, which aims to deploy AI tools to 1,000 primary healthcare clinics across Africa to address severe healthcare workforce shortages.
Who is being left behind?
As Kenya races to embrace AI in healthcare, with global tech giants and local startups deploying chatbots, diagnostic tools, and digital health platforms, two questions come up: Who actually benefits from this digital health revolution? More critically, who is being left behind?
OpenAI, an American AI organisation, reports that more than 40 million people globally use ChatGPT daily for health information, for decoding medical bills, for spotting overcharges, for appealing insurance denials, and, when access to doctors is limited, even for attempting to self-diagnose.
More than five percent of all ChatGPT messages globally are about healthcare, with between 1.6 million and 1.9 million health insurance questions sent weekly.
In Kenya, where the country produces only 7,000 health professionals annually against a deficit of 70,000, these tools are handy.
Nearly seven in 10 healthcare conversations with AI happen outside normal clinic hours, making them particularly appealing for a nation where accessing a doctor often means a half-day journey and waiting in queues until late evening.
Language barrier
At Penda Health’s 15 Nairobi clinics, a study of 39,849 patient visits showed clinicians using OpenAI’s ‘AI Consult’ achieved a 16 percent reduction in diagnostic errors.
‘The findings have shifted what we expect as the standard of care within Penda. We probably wouldn’t want our clinicians to be completely without this,’ said Dr Robert Korom, chief medical officer at Penda.
His patients speak English or Swahili comfortably, have smartphones, and can afford data, but they are the minority.
The language barrier is staggering. Kenya has over 60 languages, yet only four percent speak English as their first language, while most AI health tools work best in English. For instance, Zuri, a chatbot for sexual and reproductive health, initially launched in English only. User feedback forced developers to add Swahili, but this still covers just two of Kenya’s dozens of languages.
Martha Chebet, a community health volunteer in Uasin Gishu County, sees this daily.
‘When I try to explain what the chatbot says, I translate from English to Kalenjin, and the meaning gets lost. Medical words don’t translate well. By the time I explain it, we could have walked to the clinic,’ she said.
AI health tools are most accessible to Kenya’s English-speaking elite, who already have the best access to doctors, while the rural majority, who need them most, cannot use them.