The Responsible AI Lab (RAIL) presented the impact of its partnership with FAIR Forward, GIZ, at the Ghana Digital Innovation Week 2025. The session, held at the Accra International Conference Centre, highlighted RAIL’s journey and its tangible impacts in bridging the AI skills gap and developing Afro-centric solutions.
Gifty Antoinette Hukpati, Communication Officer for RAIL, opened the session by introducing RAIL’s core mission: to build local AI talent and drive the development of afro-centric AI data and solutions. She recounted the Lab’s origin in 2022, led by the Principal Investigator and Scientific Director, Prof. Jerry John Kponyo and team, to tackle one of the region’s most significant barriers to technological progress—the AI skills gap.
“Supported by IDRC’s AI4D initiative and the ‘FAIR Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All’ initiative, the Responsible AI Lab was established at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST),” Hukpati stated. “Our goal is to promote the responsible use and deployment of inclusive AI by African communities to address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) directly,” she added.
She outlined RAIL’s impactful work across key thematic areas, including AI in health, AI in energy, AI in agriculture, Women in technology, and AI in assistive technologies for persons with disabilities.
Matthew Cobbinah, a RAIL PhD Scholar, detailed a successful collaboration between RAIL, FAIR Forward (GIZ), the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and the Plant Protection and Regulation Services Directorate (PPRSD). This partnership led to the creation of the Crop Disease Image Dataset and Detection Toolbox, a pioneering initiative that led to the Ghana Crop Disease Detection Challenge, hosted on the Zindi platform. The challenge mobilised data scientists to build lightweight, mobile-friendly AI models for identifying diseases in tomatoes, corn, and peppers, using the dataset curated by RAIL and hosted on Kaggle.
“The winners of the challenge have developed cutting-edge AI solutions that are not only precise but are also designed to function offline in resource-constrained environments,” Cobbinah explained. “This provides actionable insights directly to our smallholder farmers, empowering them to protect their livelihoods,” he added.
The winners of the Ghana Crop Disease Challenge were:
- First Place: Ronny Polle and Adeyinka Sotunde (₵65,000)
- Second Place: Stefan Strydom (₵40,000)
- Third Place: Raphael Laibuni Kiminya (₵25,000)
The presentation also celebrated a significant milestone in RAIL’s capacity-building mission. Thanks to sponsorship from FAIR Forward, GIZ, four RAIL PhD Scholars-Amina Salifu, Albert Dede, Julius Adinkra, and Matthew Cobbinah- are set to graduate in November 2025 from the Department of Computer Engineering, KNUST. Their success underscores RAIL’s commitment to cultivating a robust pipeline of local AI experts.
RAIL announced the Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development (AI4SD) project, funded by the French Embassy in Ghana. A critical component of the AI4SD project is the curation of essential, locally-relevant datasets, which will serve as a foundation for the entire AI innovation ecosystem in Ghana and beyond.