Co-creating Inclusive and Ethical Gen-AI Solutions for Community Health in Zanzibar
This initiative explores how generative AI can be responsibly integrated into existing community health workflows in Zanzibar to strengthen the effectiveness of Community Health Workers (CHWs) and their supervisors. Built on the Jamii ni Afya platform—Zanzibar’s national, digitally enabled community health program—the project identifies high-impact, feasible AI use cases through user research, behavioral personas, and a human-centered design process.
The result is a prototype chatbot for community health worker supervisors, running on WhatsApp. It reviews health data, highlights health trends and produces summaries to be shared with community health workers. The results speak for themselves: supervisors report being fully prepared for monthly meetings, with 95% expressing increased confidence in addressing questions accurately. Community health workers overwhelmingly confirm that guidance has improved, with 80% rating it as significantly better and 97% wanting the guidance to continue. The next step is to show how better guidance and improved efficiency translate into better health service provision and better health outcomes.
This work aligns with the Principles for Digital Development and WHO’s Global Digital Health Strategy (2020–2025), and represents one of the first behaviorally informed, co-designed Gen-AI initiatives for community health in Africa.
Participants will gain:
A replicable, ethical process for co-designing Gen-AI tools with frontline health workers
A framework to assess feasibility, risks, and impact of AI use cases in community health
Practical insights on integrating Gen-AI into existing digital health platforms
Lessons on using behavioral personas to align AI solutions with real-world workflows
Speaker
Dr. Hannah McCarrick Mikidadi is D-tree's Country Director in Zanzibar. With over 14+ years, Hannah has worked across Africa, primarily Zanzibar, Tanzania and Zambia, to bridge research, policy, and practice in digital innovation, health, and gender equality. She has led collaborations with governments, donors, and research institutions to design scalable, evidence-based, and human-centered systems. Her PhD from the University of Sheffield explored how rural farming communities in Tanzania actively shape and appropriate digital technologies through everyday, informal practices — studying how innovation emerges from people and local contexts rather than pre-packaged solutions. These insights now inform her approach to leadership, systems design, and organizational transformation.
Co-creating Inclusive and Ethical Gen-AI Solutions for Community Health in Zanzibar
Session Type
Breakout Sessions
Description
Theme: Future Theme: Shaping Tomorrow - Building Equitable and Sustainable Digital Futures. Unpack how funding shifts, the expansion of digital public infrastructure, and youth leadership are redefining localisation and shaping more inclusive digital futures.Primary Tag: Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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