At a time when the world is busy writing about what artificial intelligence will do to mankind, a group of young women has quietly rewritten the script by demonstrating what they can do with it. And theirs may be the far more interesting AI story.
At a recent demo day event at Google’s Gurugram Office, UNICEF Generation Unlimited and Technovation hosted eleven women founders aged between 19 and 24 – to showcase their ideas. Barely 12 weeks earlier, many had never written a line of code. Some had never spoken to a customer.
More than 1,000 young women from 60 countries entered this unique programme. Just 12 weeks later, over 200 had completed working products, demo videos and pitches. The interesting thing about these eleven young women founders is that they did not choose some distant, futuristic problem. They looked around them, at their families, communities and everyday lives, and found problems that were already demanding answers.
Indian sisters Faria and Suha Zubair built ‘Strabi-Cure’ after seeing their brother struggle with ‘Strabismus’, a condition in which the eyes do not align. Their solution uses a smartphone camera for screening, combines it with exercises and progress tracking, and includes a low-cost home therapy device.
From Mexico came Ambar Hernandez and Fátima Gaytán, whose CONCORA tackles a familiar hurdle: young people being rejected for jobs because they lack the experience they have never been given the chance to acquire. The problems are different. The instinct is the same. See something that does not work. Ask why it must remain that way. Then try to build an answer. That is where the initiative gets really interesting.
Thomas Michael Kaye, Senior Adviser, Global Solutions, Generation Unlimited, UNICEF, sees that as central to the programme.”What these girls have shown is persistence, perseverance and the power of partnerships,” he says.”Our approach was simple. Seek out young girls and women who had identified local problems and wanted to bring about change. Through this programme and with AI tools, they have managed to do just that.”
Rebecca Anderson, Chief Learning and Innovation Officer, Technovation, has watched the transformation of hundreds of young women over the last 12 weeks, according to a Press release by UNICEF.