Samawati Collective and SemaBOX today convened a high-level panel, AI in Agriculture and Health, at Baraza Media Lab in Nairobi, bringing together practitioners, funders, government, civil society and ecosystem builders to confront a defining question for Kenya: AI is arriving in the country’s clinics and farms whether we shape it or not. Will it serve the communities who need it most, or simply add another pilot that fades when the funding does?
The stakes are not abstract. Agriculture remains the backbone of Kenya’s economy, contributing roughly a third of GDP. Smallholder farmers produce an estimated 80 percent of the country’s agricultural output, often without access to the data, forecasts and advisory services that AI can now deliver at scale. In health, panelists heard, around 90 percent of maternal and neonatal deaths in Kenya are preventable, with roughly a third linked to gaps in health-seeking behaviour, including mothers not recognising danger signs such as severe headaches or bleeding in time to act.
“AI is already making decisions in Kenya’s clinics and farms. The only question is whether the people those decisions affect have a seat at the table,” said Maurice Otieno, Executive Director of Samawati Collective. “This convening is our answer. Public-interest AI must be built with communities, such as farmers, mothers, clinicians, citizens not simply deployed on them. We are not here to admire the technology; we are here to decide, together, what it must deliver.”
The panel marked the public launch of a partnership between Samawati Collective and SemaBOX to build a movement at the intersection of AI and Health, and AI and Agriculture, not a collection of isolated tools, but a community of builders, ministries, farmers, clinicians and citizens shaping what public-interest AI should actually deliver for Kenya, in step with the ambitions of Kenya’s National AI Strategy 2025–2030.
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THE PANEL FEATURED
- Javan Waita — Director, Kenya Programs, Jacaranda Health, leading the national scale-up of the PROMPTS AI-enabled maternal health platform.
- Tina Mkara, MISK — Industry Manager, Natural Resources, Esri Eastern Africa, geospatial expert applying GIS, remote sensing and data analytics to food security and climate action; Vice Chair, Engineering Surveyors Chapter, Institution of Surveyors of Kenya.
- Immanuel Momanyi — Head of Acceleration, Villgro Africa, supporting health and agri-tech ventures across Sub-Saharan Africa to secure capital and scale.
“Africa’s story about technology is too often told about us rather than by us,” said Dan Aceda, Founder, SemaBOX. “SemaBOX exists to put the microphone in African hands. Through this partnership, the mothers, farmers and clinicians who live with these technologies every day will be the ones shaping the narrative and, ultimately, the tools themselves.”
Discussions spanned AI at national scale in maternal health, geospatial intelligence for food security, the sustainability of donor-funded innovation, and the risk of AI deepening inequality if data costs, literacy and smartphone access are ignored.
FROM THE PANEL
On AI’s role in maternal health, Javan Waita, Director of Kenya Programs at Jacaranda Health, described how the PROMPTS platform has grown to reach some 4 million mothers, enrolling 800,000 more each year. “When we started, our nurses could answer a hundred questions a day. Today, PROMPTS receives around fifteen thousand, and AI triages every one of them, identifying the roughly seven percent that signal danger signs, such as severe headaches or bleeding, and escalating them to our clinical nurses. That is what has driven a 27 percent increase in health-seeking behaviour, at a lifetime cost of about two and a half dollars per mother.”
On sustainability beyond donor funding, Immanuel Momanyi, Head of Acceleration at Villgro Africa, issued a stark challenge: “At a recent Council of Governors convening in Kisumu, not one of the 47 county governments in the room had a budget line for innovation. And yet, if you want true scale, government is the biggest client you will ever have. The startups that survive are the ones that build their models into the systems that already exist.” Waita pointed to Jacaranda’s answer, a cost-sharing model under which counties, including Kisumu and Tharaka Nithi, have taken up 100 per cent of enrolment costs, and Mombasa has committed to 80 per cent, with PROMPTS embedded in government electronic medical records to cut enrolment costs by more than half. “If Jacaranda were to shut down tomorrow, the priority is that the solution survives,” he said.
On agriculture, Tina Mkara, Industry Manager for Natural Resources at Esri Eastern Africa, argued that AI’s real value lies beyond prediction: “An experienced farmer often already knows when it will rain. The real value of AI is in the aftermath, linking that farmer to insurance, getting drought-resistant seeds to where they are needed, and turning satellite, drone and weather data into decisions governments can act on.” She also highlighted AI’s potential for public accountability: “If the government invested 100 million shillings in AI to audit health insurance claims, it could save 900 million from fraudulent claims.”
Panelists also warned that AI risks becoming elitist, excluding communities due to data bundle costs, literacy barriers and low smartphone penetration, and called for algorithms trained on local knowledge, from village elders’ traditional flood indicators to medicinal trees, rather than textbook science alone.
ABOUT SAMAWATI COLLECTIVE
Samawati Collective is a Kenya-based living ecosystem for creative and civic change, built on four interconnected pillars: performing arts, research and documentation, a narrative lab, and AI and civic technology. Samawati is building one of Africa’s first spaces dedicated to the ethical use of AI — a community hub where storytellers, researchers and justice advocates harness emerging technology to amplify marginalised voices, preserve African cultural heritage and drive social accountability. Working at the intersection of hearts (narratives) and minds (evidence), Samawati exists to give every creative spirit a home to express, connect and shape democratic and cultural narratives across generations.
ABOUT SEMABOX
SemaBOX is a specialist podcast studio headquartered in Nairobi and Africa’s biggest podcast incubator, providing technology and production capacity for podcast-making and storytelling by African creators — and creators telling stories about Africa. Active in six of Africa’s largest podcast markets with a creator network of more than 400 titles, SemaBOX spans production, creator training through its Runway academy, and distribution — building the infrastructure through which African stories reach African and global audiences.
