Ghana’s AI practitioners move to draft Guide Book

A cross-section of AI practitioners, experts, policymakers and consumers in Ghana have initiated a process to draft a Practitioners’ Guide Book to ensure that AI helps everyone and harms no one in Ghana. 

The initiative, led by Heritors Labs and the GIZ’s Fair Forward is meant to ensure that AI use and practice in Ghana is legal, ethical, inclusive and collaborative within the Ghanaian context.

The guide book is intended to be a reference book for responsible AI practice, as well providing information on all practitioners in Ghana and what they are doing, where and how to get investment for AI development, what opportunities exist in the space and how to access them etc.

At a Workshop to collect ideas for the Practitioners’ Guide Book, Vice President of Heritors Labs, Kofi Ocloo noted that as AI emerges, governments around the world, including Ghana are developing policies to ensure that AI serves their peoples well. But it has also become important for AI practitioners themselves to have a guide book that is consumer centric and ensures that AI helps everyone and hurts no one.

He noted that the prospects for AI is tremendous and that means there is a need to develop some guarding rails to ensure that it does not outgrow the people and exclude the vulnerable.

AI, he said has the potential to bridge the rural-urban, economic and education divides and also ensure seamless inclusivity of people who would have otherwise been marginalized.

“Whereas AI is closing all these gaps, it is important to ensure that it is all done in an ethical way so that no one is shortchanged in term of abuse of privacy and data,” he said.

On the question of the fear that AI will replace humans and render million jobless, Kofi Ocloo said “in reality, AI rather makes people better at what they do, and that is why it is important for us to identify exactly how AI works within our specific ecosystem so that we can harness its full potential for the betterment of our people.”

Technical Advisor at GIZ’s Fair Forward, Elikplim Sabblah noted that a lot of work is being done in Ghana in the area of AI but there is very little coordination and support for those developments.

He said, Fair Forward is therefore focused on helping to democratize AI in Ghana by doing three main things:

• Ensuring easy access to data, which is the life blood of any AI model. Fair Forward together with the Responsible AI Lab at KNUST have, for instance, generated some critical data on plant diseases to help farmers identify and fight diseases that destroy their farms.
• Capacity Building – providing training to practitioners, policymakers etc
• Policy development – helping to develop Ghana’s AI policy framework, which is currently in the works and almost nearing approval and passages into law.

Elikplim Sabblah noted in other jurisdictions where Fair Forward operates, a practitioners’ guide book was development and launched even ahead of a national strategy, and that helped the practitioners a great deal in identifying sources of funding, drove collaboration instead of people doing similar things working in silos among other benefits.

He is therefore looking forward to Ghana drawing from the examples of other jurisdictions in Africa to ensure that a practitioners’ guide book is developed as soon as possible, given the fact that AI is here to stay.

Lead Consultant on the project, William Brown-Acquaye said Ghana cannot afford to miss the AI revolution, and a critical way to get Ghana in the loop is to develop a practitioners’ guide book which will help to properly harness the full potential of AI for the benefit of Ghanaians.

The guide book, he said, will for instance spell out the priority sector for AI adoption in Ghana, which are agriculture, education, health, financial inclusion and others.

He said the guide book will also help to leverage Ghana’s existing technology ecosystem, serving as a one-stop-shop that centralizes all the information about the industry, and data sources for easy access to all.

According to him, even though AI is a global phenomenon, it is important to note that what it ethical in one jurisdiction may not be ethical in another jurisdiction, hence the need to factor in local ethical norms into AI practice, and also clearly spell out what constitutes inclusivity in Ghana.

William Brown-Acquaye also noted that the collaborative approach to developing a practitioners’ guide book and even national policies and regulations is critical because it helps to ensure that AI designs are devoid of individual biases and also helps to prevent private sector from building models solely for profit.

“It is also important that we do not fall into the trap of importing solutions from abroad – we need to establish our own research and development structures around AI and build our own skill sets tailored for our national development,” he said.

He also said the guide book should clearly spell out how Ghana’s AI strategy works into global governance policies, as well as sectoral policies to ensure that it is both locally and globally relevant.

Participants at the workshop were made up of persons from academia, policymaking, practitioners, financial technology, cybersecurity, media, persons living with disability and more.