NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov 16 – Kenya’s Shamiri Institute has unveiled shamiriAI, a homegrown artificial intelligence platform designed to deliver scalable and cost-efficient mental health support to young people across Africa.
The tool positions Kenya as an emerging hub for commercially viable, socially targeted AI solutions amid growing pressure to expand access to mental healthcare.
ShamiriAI integrates machine learning, data analytics and speech recognition to improve efficiency and consistency in mental health delivery—a sector facing surging demand and severe shortages of trained professionals.
Across Africa, millions of youth lack access to care. In Kenya, fewer than 500 psychiatrists serve a population of more than 50 million, leaving traditional one-on-one therapy models unable to meet need. ShamiriAI aims to bridge that gap by enabling mass service delivery at far lower cost.
At the 2025 Shamiri Summit, themed Wires and Signals, Shamiri Institute Founder and CEO Tom Osborn announced the organisation’s target to reach 10 million young people by 2032, leveraging the platform’s ability to scale beyond Kenya.
“AI allows us to bridge gaps that human systems alone cannot close — it makes care smarter, faster, and more culturally grounded,” Osborn said.
“Africa doesn’t have to wait for imported innovation. We are building our own tools, training AI on our languages, and creating technology that understands our people. The platform analyzes therapy sessions in real time, assessing adherence to evidence-based protocols and providing feedback to help therapists improve faster. Using predictive modeling, shamiriAI also matches clients with the therapies most likely to help them based on their symptoms and needs, creating data-driven, personalized care pathways that optimize limited human resources.”
A key innovation behind shamiriAI is its capacity to process Kenya’s multilingual speech patterns. Its Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) engine is trained on English, Swahili and Sheng, enabling accurate transcription and analysis of conversations that switch between languages—a common feature of Kenyan communication.
The platform builds on Shamiri’s evidence-based mental health model delivered in schools by trained lay providers aged 18 to 22. The intervention, which requires only 10 hours of training, is brief, de-stigmatized and designed for scale, reducing anxiety and depression by up to 80 percent with effects lasting up to three years. So far, the programme has reached more than 185,000 young people in Kenya at a cost of just $7 per youth, making it one of the continent’s most cost-efficient mental health interventions.
French Ambassador to Kenya and Somalia, H.E. Arnaud Suquet, highlighted Kenya’s potential to lead in socially driven AI during the Summit.
“A broader collaboration of technologies with societal future is essential. It is what was echoed at the Paris Summit on AI that was held on February this year. Technology and AI can rightly address global health issues. As one of the leading tech hubs in Africa with recognized talent in the space and green energy to power AI-related systems and data centers, Kenya is well-positioned to be at the forefront of this and Shamiri has stood out with a solution. Their model reaches young people where they are through peer support at just KSH 1,000 a person — a model over ten times cheaper than traditional therapy. Through AI-led innovations such as shamiriAI, a digital platform designed to support large-scale implementation, they have been able to reach close to 200,000 Kenyans.”
