The Africa Hub for Innovation and Development (AFHID) has called for the development and adoption of trusted, homegrown and human-centred Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to address healthcare challenges in Nigeria.
The call was made on Thursday at a pre-summit webinar on AI in health, where experts examined the opportunities and challenges of deploying emerging technologies across the health sector.
The Chief Executive Officer of Advantage Health Africa (Aha), Abimbola Adebakin, said trust was particularly important in deploying AI in healthcare because health is a “low-forgiveness sector”.
She said Aha had built its ‘myMedicines’ platform around familiar channels such as WhatsApp, allowing users to interact through a platform they already understood before AI was introduced.
“Trust comes when people know to an extent who is behind the device,” she said.
Adebakin added that Aha had also automated order processing and customer engagement on its website because it was a channel familiar to its users.
According to her, trust can be lost through a single confusing AI response, making it necessary for innovators to build systems gradually and ensure that their operations are understandable and reversible.
She said AI was increasingly being applied beyond the last-mile delivery of healthcare services, including helping patients understand drug-drug interactions, possible side effects and proper medicine storage.
AI is also supporting backend pharmacy operations, including demand forecasting and inventory control through the Advantage Platform, she added.
Dr Chinonso Egemba, Co-founder of AwaDoc, speaking on misinformation and deepfakes, said malicious actors were increasingly using AI to clone trusted faces and spread false health information.
He noted that while early deepfakes could be detected relatively easily, advances in AI meant that future manipulated content could become increasingly difficult to distinguish from genuine information.
Egemba, a public health communication strategist, called for greater public exposure to verified health information to help people identify authentic content.
“You cannot place the responsibility of identifying misinformation on the populace. The only way you can identify fake is if you have been exposed to the original,” he said.
He cited a study by KPMG and the University of Melbourne which found that 59 per cent of Nigerians surveyed listed loss of human interaction as their top AI-related risk.
This, he said, underscored the need to ensure that the expansion of AI does not eliminate human involvement in healthcare.
According to him, scale and trust should complement each other, with AI serving as a primary source of health information for large populations, while human experts provide specialised support when necessary.
“What we need is human-in-the-loop design. At the point that matters, there should be help that can come in by a human being,” he said.
Egemba also urged health institutions to leverage trusted community structures and local languages to amplify verified health information and counter misinformation.
The Managing Director and Co-Founder of Fertitude, Dr Kieva Chris-Amusan, said women would be more likely to adopt AI-powered health solutions when the technologies were safe, private, accurate and capable of solving genuine problems.
She said that at Fertitude, users’ data remained anonymous, with records stored using identification numbers rather than names or email addresses, while its privacy policy clearly explained how users’ information was handled.
“The broad answer is if it works and it protects my privacy, gives me the answer I need, I will come back,” she said.
Chris-Amusan noted that many large language models were trained predominantly on Western populations and could therefore fail to adequately reflect the experiences of African women.
She stressed the need for AI health solutions developed for Nigeria to incorporate local accents, languages (including Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo), as well as images and contexts familiar to Nigerian users.
According to her, appropriate user experience, accurate retention of patient history and product-led reminders were also important in sustaining users’ engagement with AI health platforms.
The panellists identified poor design thinking, inadequate institutional validation and fragmented identifiers as some of the barriers to scaling AI solutions in Nigeria’s health sector.
They therefore called for clear rules on data protection and stronger institutional backing for innovators, while encouraging stakeholders to share failures and lessons from AI projects to help strengthen the wider health technology ecosystem.
They also stressed the importance of developing a single identifier for health services, citing the Bank Verification Number (BVN) system in the financial technology sector as an example of how a common identifier could support service delivery.
The panellists further called for government-led infrastructure and support mechanisms, including a health innovation accelerator modelled on initiatives such as the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) approach, to support health technology founders.
According to them, government is more open to innovation than many founders perceive, while innovators need to demonstrate the value of their solutions and understand the different layers of governance, infrastructure and literacy at the facility level.
The pre-summit webinar is part of activities leading to the main AI in Health Summit convened by AFHID. It is expected to further examine the role of AI and innovation in addressing healthcare challenges and strengthening health outcomes in Nigeria.
