The Society for Family Health (SFH) Nigeria has emerged as Africa’s first comprehensively AI-ready health non-governmental organisation following an intensive training programme that enabled 35 non-technical staff members to build four deployable artificial intelligence healthcare solutions within 72 hours.

The development followed the “Leveraging Artificial Intelligence Training” held in Abuja recently, which moved beyond AI awareness to hands-on solution development. Participants drawn from programme operations, monitoring and evaluation, finance, communications, human resources and supply chain units worked in agile sprint teams to address real operational challenges facing the organisation.

Speaking on the outcome of the programme, Managing Director, SFH Nigeria, Dr Omokhudu Idogho, said the initiative was designed to empower staff to apply artificial intelligence directly to the organisation’s mission of improving health outcomes in Nigeria. He noted that the results demonstrated that AI adoption was no longer a distant prospect for African non-profits.

According to him, the four solutions produced during the sprint addressed key areas of healthcare delivery and organisational effectiveness. They include MAMAI™, a maternal health intelligence platform that forecasts high-risk pregnancies, optimises community health worker routes and provides symptom triage with offline functionality; Zara, a multilingual AI engagement system supporting health communication in English, Hausa, Yoruba and Nigerian Pidgin; the SFH Impact Hub, an automated donor intelligence and reporting platform; and an SFH Human Resource Information System adapted to the Nigerian context.

The programme was designed and led by Chief Executive Officer of Cihan Media Communications, Dr Celestine Achi, who described the outcome as a shift in how innovation can occur within development organisations. He said non-technical professionals were able to function as AI strategists and solution builders without outsourcing innovation.

The training introduced the TABS-D framework for prompt and context engineering, hands-on application of AI tools using SFH data, ethics and governance training aligned with Nigeria’s Data Protection Act 2023, and agile sprint methodology. At the end of the programme, all participants received Artificial Intelligence Mastery Certification, awarded based on demonstrated competence.

SFH also announced the adoption of a Responsible AI Policy to guide artificial intelligence use across its operations, covering human oversight, data protection and accountability. Dr Idogho said the organisation was committed to ensuring that innovation remains ethical and community-centred.