Health data is Kenya's new land We must own it before it's gone

Picture this - a team of researchers from a foreign country arrives in one of the low-income settlements in Nairobi.

Through the local community leadership, they undertake an exercise to measure blood pressure, check blood sugar, photograph eyes with a retinal scanner for hundreds of residents.

 Two years later, an  artificial intelligence (AI) tool trained on these data is shown to predict heart disease and stroke risk up to a decade in advance.

 The AI trained tool goes on to fetch hundreds of millions of dollars in user fees once deployed by the owners.

In return the people who took part in the research get nothing from these proceeds.  This situation is increasingly becoming a reality in Kenya.

Just recently, a friend in the medical technology industry was approached by a European inventor of such a tool, this time to help them perform a – proof of concept study - in a Kenyan slum since the regulatory requirements in Europe proved too demanding for them.

Needless to say, the request was rejected after back and forth and discovery of the intention behind the request.