When she was in her early teens, Rokhaya Diagne would retreat to her brother’s room, where she played online computer games for hours, day after day, until her mother finally got fed up.
“My mom said, ‘This is an addiction,’” Diagne said. “She said if I didn’t stop, she would send me to the hospital to see a psychiatrist.”
Her mother’s interventions worked. While Diagne’s passion for computers has, if anything, intensified, she has redirected her energies to higher pursuits than levelling up at Call of Duty.
Now her goals include using artificial intelligence to help the world eradicate malaria by 2030, a project she is focused on at her health startup.
Video games “taught me a lot of things,” said Diagne, 25, a Senegalese computer science major who lives in Dakar, the capital. “They gave me problem-solving skills.
“I don’t regret playing those things,” she added.
A fast talker in bluejeans and hijab, Diagne is part of a subset of Africa’s enormous youth population whose lives have been shaped by screens and the internet — and who are connected to the world to a degree that no generation before them could have imagined.
For young Africans interested in technology-related careers, the internet has offered a powerful addition to an education system that some experts worry is hobbling Africa’s ability to take advantage of its young people. While graduating more students than ever before, schools still rely heavily on stand-and-deliver lectures.
The wealth of free online coding boot camps, robotics lessons and lectures from the likes of Stanford, Oxford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are having a big impact across Africa, inspiring careers in engineering and seeding ideas for startups.
While some of her cohorts are most passionate about sensor fusion or robotics, Diagne is into AI and machine deep-learning. She helped create an award-winning networking app to meet others with similar interests — like Tinder but for tech nerds. And she founded a startup called Afyasense (she borrowed “afya,” or health, from Swahili, an East African language) for her disease-detection projects using AI.
“She is someone with whom talking is a pleasure due to the quality of the questions she asks and also the answers she gives,” said Ismaïla Seck, a leader in Senegal’s growing AI community.
Like many other young people in Africa’s tech boom, Diagne is at the centre of overlapping phenomena on the continent — a growing, educated middle class raising even more educated children who, with each tap on a keyboard, have adopted a sense that the continent’s biggest problems can be solved. Diagne wants to use AI to improve health outcomes in the region, a choice she made after a range of childhood illnesses landed her in Dakar hospitals, which struggled to provide consistent, quality care.
“I know the mistakes that are unfortunately made,” she said.
Diagne’s drive has earned her recognition. Her malaria project recently won an award at an AI conference in Ghana and a national award in Senegal for social entrepreneurship, as well as $8,000 in funding.
As a child, she said she was reserved but always has had a huge appetite for research, fed by her father, a retired literature professor and writer. When faced with his daughter’s questions about how the world worked or about her Muslim faith, he would make her try to find the answer herself. He rewarded her with apples, still her favourite fruit.
She enrolled at the École Supérieure Polytechnique de Dakar as a biology major and scored an internship at the Principal Hospital of Dakar. But days of reviewing lab samples helped her realise that kind of work wasn’t for her.
“I wanted way more challenges than fearing the bacteria in my body,” she said. “What I wanted was innovation and being able to create and use my brain for something instead of predictive results that I just followed.”
Dejected that she had made the wrong choice, Diagne dropped out of school and spent a year plotting her next steps.
She recalled something her brother used to tell her: Do things that are harder because there’s less competition. She picked bioinformatics, the science of both the storing of complex biological data and of analysing it to find new insights. The options for studying it in Senegal were extremely limited.
— The New York Times.
The writer won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting as part of a team for NYT
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