This is a submission for the Google I/O Writing Challenge
I'm Building an AI Doctor in Nigeria With No Money. Google I/O 2026 Just Handed Me a Lifeline.
Let me be honest with you from the start.
I'm not writing this from a Silicon Valley office. I'm not a developer with a startup visa and a Stripe Atlas account. I'm a 24-year-old self-taught developer in Aba, Nigeria — a commercial city in the southeast of the country better known for its garment manufacturers and traders than for its software engineers. I work on a Windows 11 laptop. I have an outstanding AWS bill. Most of my projects live on my local machine because I can't afford to deploy them.
And I am building a telemedicine AI platform called Telmed — an AI doctor designed to reach the people in my country who are dying not from incurable diseases, but from the simple, brutal absence of access to proper medical care.
