What are your thoughts?

Tech Talk Africa | Season 2 Episode 09: Heroes Without Scrubs

Guest: Uzma Qureishi, Senior Manager EHR Operations at AGA KHAN UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL, EAST AFRICA

Some of the most important work in healthcare happens far from the bedside, and it still saves lives. I’m joined by Uzma Qureishi, an award-winning health IT leader who’s helped transform hospital care by keeping patient safety and real clinical workflows at the center of every digital decision. From the very start, her story is personal: watching her mother navigate cancer care shapes a career built on impact, not titles.

We get into what it really took to deliver a fully integrated electronic health record and run a major go-live with a 157-person command center. Uzma breaks down why legacy systems and scattered standalone tools create chaos, why stakeholder engagement can’t be a checkbox, and why subject matter experts like physicians, pharmacists, and surgeons must help build things like order sets and standardized care pathways. If you care about healthcare change management, health informatics, and EHR implementation that actually works, this is the playbook.

Then we tackle AI in healthcare with honesty. Radiology AI can speed up reads, but only if governance is tight: ethical use, security assessments, downtime planning, and strict data privacy aligned to Kenya’s Data Protection Act, not generic global claims. We also talk mentorship and internships, building local health tech capacity, and what it means for women in tech to “take your seat” and own it.

If this conversation sparks something for you, subscribe, share it with a friend in healthcare, and leave a review so more people can find the heroes without scrubs.

Credits
Host:

• Stella Gichuhi

Producer:

• James Njoroge

Executive Producers:

• Harry Hare
• Agutu Dan

What are your thoughts?

Tech Talk Africa | Season 2 Episode 08: AI Sovereignty in The Age of the Kill Switch

Guest: Timothy Laku, Fractional CTO/CIO

A single policy decision can break your AI roadmap overnight. That’s not fearmongering, it’s the new operating environment when frontier AI models, GPU supply chains, and model weights sit inside global power dynamics. We sit down with fractional CIO Timothy Laku to unpack a scenario that should make every African CTO, CIO, founder, and policymaker pause: what happens when the AI model your hospital, bank, or startup depends on becomes unavailable with no warning?

We dig into real-world signals, from chip export controls to sudden model restrictions, and why “the provider will protect us” is not a strategy. We also look at the EU’s sovereign cloud direction as a practical playbook: build a plan B, negotiate with leverage, and treat AI like critical infrastructure. Then we pressure-test the China angle: rapidly improving models, dramatically lower costs, and the shift toward offline AI and local compute that could change who wins the next phase of adoption.

Most importantly, we get specific about what AI sovereignty can look like without sliding into isolation: data residency for sensitive and personal data, tiered access to valuable local datasets, licensing and royalties for indigenous language value, and a business continuity plan that includes on-prem or local-model fallbacks. If you’re building with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any frontier model, this conversation is a checklist for resilience.

Subscribe for more Tech Talk Africa, share this with a CIO or policymaker in your circle, and leave a review if you want deeper coverage of African sovereign compute. What does a realistic hybrid AI strategy look like in your organization?

Credits
Host:

• Stella Gichuhi

Producer:

• James Njoroge

Executive Producers:

• Harry Hare
• Agutu Dan

What are your thoughts?

AI is moving at “anything you can imagine is real” speed, and that pace is already colliding with cybersecurity, elections, scams, and jobs. We talk with Shiphrah Wairima, Kenya's President / AI Advocate, in the Global Council for Responsible AI, about what AI governance actually looks like when you stop treating it like a policy buzzword and start treating it like safety work. From her background in information technology and security operations to her focus on AI security research, Shiphrah brings a grounded view of responsible AI that includes both people and systems.

We dig into the threats showing up right now: deepfakes, AI-generated images, and voice cloning that can con families and target people online. Shiphrah shares practical AI safety habits, including the idea of a family code word, and we explore why cybersecurity and AI governance are inseparable when trust is the real product. We also tackle the career reality many teams avoid saying out loud: AI will automate parts of entry-level cybersecurity, so the smartest move is strategic upskilling that adds AI literacy to security and security to AI.

For leaders, we break down AI red teaming in plain terms, why CFOs and CTOs should budget for it before the breach, and how to think like an attacker without becoming one. We close by challenging policymakers to build adaptive regulation, involve education systems, and work with innovators so governance can keep up without killing progress, especially across Africa, where context matters.

If you found value here, subscribe, share this with a friend who needs to hear it, and leave a review with the one AI risk you want discussed next.

Credits
Host:

• Stella Gichuhi

Producer:

• James Njoroge

Executive Producers:

• Harry Hare
• Agutu Dan