Africa holds more than 70 percent of the world's genetic diversity. Any AI system built to transform global healthcare that ignores that fact is built on a flawed dataset. It'll underperform. It may cause harm.
That was the message Professor John Amuasi of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, and the Bernhard Nocht Institute of Tropical Medicine delivered at DLD Munich on Thursday. DLD is Europe's leading innovation conference and the traditional curtain-raiser to Davos.
"If we aren't training these models using the true diversity of the world, we'll be missing a lot."
Prof Amuasi spoke on the panel "Health Without Borders: Innovation and Capital at the Frontier" alongside Susan Monarez of Heartland Global Strategies and Adrian Dincsoy of Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau. The lineup brought together public health leadership, private capital, and development finance around a shared question: where does the next wave of health innovation actually come from?
The panel's answer pointed consistently toward Africa.
Prof Amuasi reminded the room that Africa has done this before. The continent bypassed legacy banking infrastructure and built mobile money ecosystems that now outpace much of the developed world. Health, he argued, is next.
"We've seen this before. The mobile money ecosystem in Africa is more sophisticated than in many parts of the world. Health presents a similar opportunity."
The panelists reinforced the investment case. Africa's freedom from entrenched health infrastructure makes it faster to adopt and scale emerging technologies. Concrete results are already emerging: affordable cholera vaccines and novel maternal health devices delivering both life-saving impact and strong financial returns.
Prof Amuasi also made the case for Africa as the world's most important laboratory for One Health research — the science of how human, animal, and environmental health interconnect. He pointed to active outbreak dynamics in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Data is siloed across human health systems, veterinary networks, and environmental monitoring, rarely synthesized until it's too late.
"AI can help us collect, integrate, and make sense of data from human health, animal health, and the environment. These are all critical to understanding disease risk and transmission."
The panel closed on a forward-looking note, but Prof Amuasi's core argument was less an appeal than a structural observation. Africa isn't asking for inclusion in global health AI. It's the missing variable without which the models don't hold.
"We're just at the starting point. Five years from now, people may be looking at Africa and asking what we're doing differently."
Presenters at the conference included Bavarian Minister-President Markus Söder and 2023 Physics Nobel Laureate Ferenc Krausz. For the investors and policymakers in the room, the more pressing question is whether they'll recognize that early enough to matter.