Kenya: Muthoni Wanyoike, committed to promoting artificial intelligence in Africa

Muthoni Wanyoike is a Kenyan data scientist and artificial intelligence (AI) enthusiast, who has been advocating for years for the practical application of AI in Africa. As the co-founder of “Nairobi Women Learning & Data science”, she also encourages African women to get into Sciences Technologies Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Forbes Africa Magazine listed her in its Top 30 under 30 ranking.

Muthoni Wanyoike is a data scientist passionate not only about bridging the gap skills in AI in Africa, but also about promoting the practical elements of AI and how it can help Africans solving their actual problems and reaching prosperity. She also advocates for having data sets representative of the actual world and its cultural as well as mindsets differences.

The Kenyan data scientist has made herself known around the world thanks to her commitment and advocacy on AI through her different initiatives, speeches…

Promoting African women in IA

Muthoni holds a Bachelor degree in Actuarial sciences from Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in 2015. Soon after her graduation, she co-founded “Nairobi Women Learning & Data Science”, an initiative aiming at encouraging Kenyan women to get into STEM careers. She launched a 4 month-program teaching women how to do data science in R and Python. The program focuses especially on coding. Up to now, it has introduced several Kenyan women to coding. « Only 0,5% of the world’s population can code. We are moving to a stage where all the products we use have code delements. For me, it’s important that we start to have a representation of the different cultures and mindsets around the table », she says in Doha Debates.

The initiative has changed the lives of several women in Kenya. Out of 10 women taking part to their trainings, 6 have got new opportunities as junior data scientists or as data science managers in their companies. Some even have quit their jobs and have started freelancing. « Encouraging women to code has been very rewarding because we think very differently. Bringing our way of looking at problems and our way of solving them brings an interesting aspect to the table », she says in Doha Debates.

Today, Nairobi chapter of Women Learning & data science is the third biggest in the world.

Advocating for practical AI in line with African people ‘s needs

 In addition to her commitment to promoting african women in STEM, she also works towards a better adaptation of AI in Africa. Given her experiences, namely as assistant program Manager at « Code for Africa » and Team lead of InstaDeep, a company specialising in AI-based decision making for companies, she has become aware of the challenges of applying AI in Africa. For the data scientist, Africa has actual problems that need to be solved using AI. She calls for a more practical AI to offer African people better life conditions. « For example, for  the problem of congestion and traffic in Africa, we do not need self driving cars, but rather better planning », she explains.  « I think that very modest advancements in AI give us the ability to solve problems and automate systems, which helps us to create better systems here », she pursues.

She also urges to have data sets representative of the world’s diversity, in terms of gender (men/women), cultures, geography…, among which facial recognition data which are most often representative of Europeans and that are supposed to be used in Africa.

Muthoni is also organizing member of Deep learning Indaba, one of the largest conference gathering AI scientists from all over Africa. Since 2020, she has been also founding editorial board member “AI and ethics” Journal, Springer Nature.

She is currently pursuing a Master of science in computer and information systems security/information Assurance in Strathmore University in Kenya.

Forbes Africa Magazine listed her in its Top 30 under 30 ranking.