AMPLIFY, a joint Sightsavers and WHO ESPEN initiative, equips national Neglected Tropical Disease programme leaders across Africa with practical, durable AI skills, taught entirely through the data, decisions, and deadlines of their own work.
The NTD field is moving decisively toward country ownership, at the same moment that partner technical and human-resource capacity is contracting. Programme teams are being asked to do more, with less support, on tighter timelines.
AMPLIFY treats AI fluency as a high-leverage response to that squeeze: a way for national teams to clean data, surface insight, and produce their own materials without waiting on external consultants.
Coursera, edX, DeepLearning.AI and YouTube are genuinely good starting points. But generic training leaves the hardest step to the learner: translating it into the realities of an NTD programme. AMPLIFY closes that gap by design.
Every example uses the data NTD professionals actually handle: MDA coverage, endemic IU status, district names, ESPEN exports. Students learn the AI skill, not an unfamiliar dataset.
Each student is paired with a mentor for individual mid-month check-ins. Not a forum, but real one-to-one support that keeps people moving when a course would otherwise lose them.
Monthly, students attend class where they watch instructors use AI tools and NTD data to solve NTD programmatic challenges. Then, students apply these skills on their own in breakout groups and in monthly assignments. Students are encouraged to expand the cohort by becoming trainers for their teams.
Too many investments deliver a capability that disappears the moment the money does. AMPLIFY is engineered for the opposite: value that compounds inside national programmes long after the cohort closes.
We never hand students a paid tool they lose access to when the course ends. The focus is transferable skill and judgement: capabilities that stay with the person and the programme.
AMPLIFY isn't funded by, or affiliated with, any AI company. Tool guidance is driven by fitness for the task and cost to the user, never by a commercial relationship.
Donors rightly prioritise programmatic delivery, which leaves capacity-building chronically under-resourced. AMPLIFY targets exactly that gap, at a fraction of the cost of the activities it strengthens.
March–September 2026 · third Thursday monthly · two hours online · plus mid-month mentoring and a peer Slack community.
Two focused hours: AI demonstrated on genuine NTD tasks, then practised together in the room.
Applied assignments on each student's own data, submitted and discussed in the cohort Slack.
A mid-month conversation with a dedicated mentor to unblock, deepen, and keep momentum.
Each module ends with the student producing a training resource to share with their own team.
The data modules follow a simple arc students can carry into any analysis, CAVA, wrapped in foundations at the start and strategy at the end.
What generative AI is, what it isn't, and responsible use from day one.
Writing effective prompts and reading what the model gives back critically.
Turning messy ESPEN exports into analysis-ready insight: the C and A of CAVA.
Charts and maps that make the numbers tell a programme story.
Teach students to set up AI tools trained on their documents and data to support applying this knowledge in training, writing, and analysis.
Using AI tools to build high-quality presentations, training materials, and other multimedia outputs.
Closing the loop: using analysis to inform programme and policy decisions.
AMPLIFY doesn't pretend AI is risk-free. Students are taught, from Module 1, a firm set of red lines (what must never be entered into a public AI tool) and to work only with de-identified, publicly available data. Capability and caution are taught together.
Because every student builds teaching materials and trains their own colleagues, a single cohort seeds AI capability across seven national NTD programmes, not just sixteen inboxes.
Country ownership, strengthened. Capability lives inside the Ministry of Health team, not with an external consultant.
Bilingual by design. Delivered across francophone and anglophone programmes, with materials in both English and French.
Independently evaluated. An external evaluator assesses the pilot, so the model can be improved and scaled on evidence.
A replicable blueprint. The curriculum and teach-back model are designed to be handed to the next cohort and the next disease area.
Funding a cohort builds lasting capability inside national NTD programmes, and helps make the case for AI fluency as standard practice across global health. We'd welcome a conversation with funders and partners.
Tell us a little about yourself and we'll be in touch when registration for the next cohort opens.