African health systems are betting on AI to fix what aid cuts broke – new report finds

Foreign aid is drying up faster than African health ministries can plug the gap, and a new report from healthcare consulting firm Salient Advisory argues that artificial intelligence has quietly become one of the few tools capable of closing the gap.

The report, titled AI Applications in African Health Supply Chains, doesn’t dwell on that framing for long before getting to numbers designed to grab a health minister’s attention. Nearly $38 million shaved off procurement spending in Ethiopia, procurement time in Kenya cut from three days to under an hour, and a 20% drop in pharmacy stock levels in Morocco.

Salient, which has spent years tracking Africa’s digital health ecosystem with Gates Foundation backing, is using those figures to make a pointed case: governments and global health institutions need to stop treating AI adoption in supply chains as a pilot programme and start treating it as infrastructure.

The report’s central structural claim is that it has identified seven recurring problems in African health supply chains where AI is now mature enough to help, drawing on interviews with supply chain leaders across global health institutions. Of those seven, the report maps 20 AI solutions already deployed across the continent that are addressing five.

Much of the AI-in-Africa conversation over the past two years has been dominated by pilots, hackathon demos and funding announcements that never quite reach a facility floor. Salient’s report instead tries to draw a distinction between tools that exist on a slide deck and those a pharmacist in Addis Ababa or Nairobi is actually using.

Also read: Circadify: How a 22-year-old and his health tech are fixing Uganda’s patient-to-doctor gap

Impacts of AI in African health sector 

The most striking figure in the report belongs to Ethiopia. Opian Technologies’ ForLab Plus platform, deployed with the Ministry of Health and the Ethiopian Pharmaceutical Supply Service, is credited with roughly $38 million in reduced planned procurement expenditure through facility-level consumption forecasting.

Launched in January 2025, backed by $435,000 in Gates Foundation funding, it had been adopted by more than 5,000 public health facilities by late 2025, with close to 9,000 registered users.

In Kenya, InSupply Health’s SMArT tool, developed with the Ministry of Health, is reported to have cut facility-level procurement planning from two to three days down to under an hour. In Morocco, an AI inventory planning model from Distripha is credited with a 20% reduction in stock levels at private pharmacies. A separate, smaller pilot in Nigeria, run with the Global Fund and AI firm V7 Labs, reportedly cut a fourth-party logistics provider’s document processing time by 87%, saving close to 960 hours and shrinking invoice-to-pay cycles from 13 days to three.

Deji Ogunye, Director of Supply Chain at Salient Advisory, commented, “Early evidence suggests AI solutions are delivering measurable results in specific contexts, offering health systems a promising path to do more with less. But self-reported results from a limited number of deployments are not yet sufficient on their own to drive adoption at scale. What’s needed now is coordinated action, from credible impact evidence to policy frameworks, to move from isolated deployments to system-wide transformation.”

Why Salient Advisory’s report timing isn’t accidental

The report comes as official development assistance to African health systems is contracting sharply, a trend that health ministries and global health funders have been sounding the alarm about for much of 2025 and 2026. Salient’s argument is essentially that AI-driven efficiency gains offer a partial substitute for shrinking aid budgets: if a ministry can’t get more money, getting more out of the money it has becomes the only lever left.

The Gates Foundation, which has funded much of Salient’s prior work in this space, is leaning into that framing too. Ann Allen, a senior programme officer at the foundation, described the report as a useful evidence base while flagging the need for African innovators to get equitable access to the AI infrastructure that makes these tools possible in the first place.

“This report offers a valuable evidence base for how AI is already being applied to real supply chain challenges across the continent and flags the need for timely action to ensure promising AI innovations in Africa have equitable access to AI infrastructure. We look forward to continued collaboration with partners across the ecosystem to build on these early results.”

Salient is calling on global health funders and institutions for a sustained investment in African-based AI capacity, funding for independent cost-impact studies, and equitable access to underlying AI infrastructure. For governments, it wants supply chain cost baselines established before any AI procurement happens, formal AI policy frameworks, in-house technical capacity, and procurement processes redesigned so that AI-generated outputs actually feed into planning decisions rather than sitting in a dashboard nobody acts on.

For vendors, the ask is more pointed: ground business cases in verified, cost-linked impact data rather than headline percentages. It’s a recommendation that applies just as much to Salient’s own report as to the companies it profiles.