IBM Watson to help solve Africa’s economic woes

IBM is investing $100 million (£62 million) over the next decade to deploy its Watson supercomputer across Africa to help scientists and researchers solve the continent’s health and social issues.

Dubbed “Project Lucy” after the earliest known human fossil, the cloud-based system will be used to analyse large chucks of data and to fuel business opportunities and growth.

The Watson technology, famously used to win US game show Jeopardy, is hoped to overcome obstacles in key development areas such as healthcare, education, water and sanitation, human mobility and agriculture.

Professor Rahamon Bello, vice chancellor of the University of Lagos, sees Project Lucy as a chance to “leapfrog” the rest of the world in technological development.

“For Africa to join, and eventually leapfrog, other economies, we need comprehensive investments in science and technology that are well integrated with economic planning and aligned to the African landscape,” said Professor Bello.

“I see a great opportunity for innovative research partnerships between companies like IBM and African organisations, bringing together the world’s most advanced technologies with local expertise and knowledge.”

IBM said the technology would have an important role to play in Africa’s development. This would range from understanding food price patterns, to estimating GDP and poverty numbers, and anticipating disease.

Africa's IBM research director, Kamal Bhattacharya, said: “In the last decade, Africa has been a tremendous growth story – yet the continent's challenges, stemming from population growth, water scarcity, disease, low agricultural yield and other factors are impediments to inclusive economic growth.

“With the ability to learn from emerging patterns and discover new correlations, Watson's cognitive capabilities hold enormous potential in Africa – helping it to achieve in the next two decades what today's developed markets have achieved over two centuries.”

IBM will also establish a new pan-African Centre of Excellence for Data-Driven Development (CEDD) to recruit research partners, universities, startups and clients.

It is also opening up Innovation Centres in Lagos, Nigeria; Casablanca, Morocco, and Johannesburg, South Africa. These new centres aim to spur local growth and fuel an ecosystem of development and entrepreneurship around Big Data analytics and cloud computing in the region.