Health data is Kenya's new land We must own it before it's gone

Audio By Vocalize

Picture this - a team of researchers from a foreign country arrives in one of the low-income settlements in Nairobi.

Through the local community leadership, they undertake an exercise to measure blood pressure, check blood sugar, photograph eyes with a retinal scanner for hundreds of residents.

Two years later, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool trained on these data is shown to predict heart disease and stroke risk up to a decade in advance.

The AI trained tool goes on to fetch hundreds of millions of dollars in user fees once deployed by the owners.