Gov’t enters  deal to leverage Artificial Intelligence to support country’s innovation agenda

The Ugandan government through the Ministry of ICT has signed a  Memorandum of Understanding with Sunbird AI, a non-profit organization aimed at leveraging Artificial Intelligence systems to increase the use of ICT services for Uganda’s social and economic development.

The MoU was signed between the Ministry of ICT Permanent Secretary, Dr.Aminah Zawedde and Dr.Ernest Mwebaze, the Executive Director for Sunbird AI.

Speaking at the ceremony, Dr.Zawedde said as part of the five year renewable deal, the not for profit organization will be required to provide artificial intelligence related advisory and consultancy services to support in leveraging the benefits of the fourth  industrial revolution through joint projects and capacity building activities targeted at boosting the Innovation ecosystem.

“This partnership will focuses on collaboration services related to ICT disciplines that are core to supporting innovations across the board. Whereas there have been numerous AI powered technologies in the various disciplines such as health, economics and even agriculture, our nation’s backbone, there are risks from naively importing technologies to Uganda which were developed without the ownership of the communities that will be affected by them, and may not be compatible with the local context and needs. This partnership will help us address this,” Dr.Zawedde said.

The Ministry of ICT Permanent Secretary explained that with the MoU, government will be seeking to leverage the use of Artificial Intelligence to boost innovation for job creation but above all, take into consideration the unique set up of the country.

She said that as part of the deal, government will tap into Sunbird AI’s flagship project, the Sunbird Translate system which is built through an open local language dataset of 25,000 sentences translated across six commonly spoken Ugandan languages including English, Acholi, Ateso, Luganda, Lugbara and Runyankole to help provide data for use by government.

“The system uses state of the art accuracy to translate and unlike any comparable dataset, Sunbird developed this to include a range of locally relevant topics for example in healthcare, agriculture and society. The system is pivoting from its original text-to-text format to text-to-speech. A key use case for Sunbird translate includes easing citizen service delivery through ensuring information is easily comprehended by those it is intended for. “

The Permanent Secretary said both parties will ensure the deal lives up to the billing to ensure members of the public benefit.

The Sunbird AI Executive Director, Dr. Ernest Mwebaze said Artificial Intelligence provides practical dimensions of various capabilities for the country.

“At Sunbird, we focus on providing evidence in building the work we do but also informing policy decisions,”he said.