Dr. Samuel Oyola, a senior scientist, received a USD 1 million grant from the Gates Foundation to build an AI-powered public health tool to predict disease outbreaks and track drug-resistant pathogens.  

Dr. Oyola is the head of genomic science at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).  

He is set to work with two PhD students who will use Artificial Intelligence to analyse the data.  

The team will collect wastewater samples from 30 sites – 18 in Kisumu and 12 in Mombasa – as part of a follow-up study that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. The two cities were chosen because Nairobi already runs a similar wastewater surveillance project, leaving Kisumu and Mombasa as the country’s other well-connected sewer networks.  

In an interview on Wednesday, Dr. Oyola stated that the COVID-19 pandemic showed that pathogens can be detected in wastewater, and that the data can be used to estimate the disease burden circulating in a community.  

“In Africa, our health-seeking behaviour is generally very poor. People can get ill and stay at home even when the disease they have could cause an outbreak,” he said.  

The new funding will enable the team to use AI to analyse samples faster and identify pathogens and their characteristics more efficiently. Each sample, Dr Oyola said, offers a snapshot of the pathogens circulating among people in the area served by that section of the sewer system.