By ITU News
After Abdulai Asana started a small bakery in her hometown of Yendi, Ghana, she wanted to improve her digital marketing skills to grow her new pastry business online.
“As an entrepreneur, if you want to promote your business, things are online, and people benefit from that,” Asana said.
This led Asana to participate in a digital skills training programme held earlier this year at the Yendi community ICT centre in Ghana’s Northern Region.
Conducted by Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC), the training was part of the ongoing ‘Boosting Digital Skills’ project, which, through the Digital Transformation Centre Initiative (DTCI) funded by NORAD and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), aims to serve citizens like Asana living in Ghana’s underserved rural communities.
Creating direct impact
Digital skills training was delivered across a network of 101 DTCI-supported ICT community centres across Ghana.
The training reached female entrepreneurs, out-of-school youth, schoolteachers, students, and other marginalized individuals, with a total of 3,339 Ghanaian citizens – including 2,220 female participants (66 per cent) – taking part in the training courses.
According to Asana, the training directly impacted her long-term goals.
“As an entrepreneur, if you join [the training] and learn more, it will help you to promote your business,” she said.
Asana plans to use the newly acquired knowledge to improve the online aspects of her small business, she added, which she ultimately hopes will become a major source of income.
The path ahead
GIFEC administrator Prince Ofosu Sefah highlighted the importance of the partnership between ITU and GIFEC for Ghanaian citizens during a closing event held in the Ashanti Region earlier this year.
By engaging further with beneficiaries, the impact of this capacity building project will continue to “make us all proud,” Sefah said.
“We will continue to engage our beneficiaries […] to make sure that the impact of this capacity building project – the skills and knowledge that they have gained – [are] put to good use,” he said, adding: “So that we can all continue to benefit from digitalization.”
To sustain project gains, GIFEC will follow-up with trainees and offer further support, Sefah added.
Next steps for the DTCI
The DTCI was launched in September 2019 by ITU in partnership with Cisco. It aims to help countries strengthen digital capacity, especially for citizens in underserved communities.
Digital Transformation Centres (DTCs) become part of a global network of institutions that work to accelerate the uptake of digital technologies among citizens and boost the capacity of young entrepreneurs and SMEs to succeed in the digital economy.
DTCs receive free access to training materials developed by ITU, Cisco, HP, and other partners, including train-the-trainer programmes. They also benefit from networking opportunities and can award internationally recognized certifications to local citizens.
As more organizations partner with the DTCI and it moves into its second phase, the Initiative will continue to offer citizens and small entrepreneurs in underserved communities digital skills training, building on its success in Ghana.
Together, they worked to develop emotion AI for different applications, initially focusing on how the technology could be used to help children with autism better understand emotional expression.
At an MIT event for corporate sponsors, Rana noted an increasing commercial interest in her work. Realising she had a unique opportunity to take something she cared about and deliver it at scale, she left MIT and partnered with Rosalind to set up Affectiva.
One of their early projects involved a partnership with Brain Power, a tech startup which embedded Affectiva’s technology into smart glasses as part of a research programme for children with autism and developmental disabilities.
After 12 years, and more than USS $51m raised through funding rounds, their company was acquired by Smart Eye, where Rana is now deputy CEO.
Applications for health and wellness
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated interest in emotion AI, as many businesses and schools made the shift to remote work and online learning. Increasing reliance on video conferencing platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom led to a rise in other challenges.
“Certain issues quickly rose to the top. We saw a drop off in learner and student engagement, and concerns with mental health. Through emotion AI, we can detect the facial and vocal biomarkers of stress, anxiety, depression, and even suicidal intent. The data is there, it’s just a case of deploying that technology at scale. But imagine the potential, with us all spending so much time on our devices,” Rana says.
Rana also sits on the board of an early-stage AI start-up, Videra Health, which operates in the remote patient monitoring space.
Videra provides an app that enables patients with depression, for example, to log in and upload a self-recorded video. Videra then uses algorithms to quantify the patients’ levels of stress and anxiety.
“The problem,” Rana says, “is that not everybody has this app. There is a need to partner with hospitals, clinicians and therapists so the technology can scale and support as many patients as possible.”
How technology can intersect with health and wellness continues to be a key focus area for Rana.
Having spent most of her career exploring how AI can sense emotion expressed physically, she is turning inward – how can sensors and AI work together to track internal health indicators, such as gut health or microbiome levels, hydration, or even ageing clocks?
“Sensors give us the data, AI can help us analyse it and personalise interventions for different people, like specific diets or exercise programmes. I think this intersection of AI and biology is the next area where AI can have a lot of impact.”
Rana was speaking from Arch Summit, the Luxembourg tech event hosted by Vodafone and Technoport joint-venture, Tomorrow Street.
