Xavier Africa: Using AI & ML to Solve Problems for African Companies

Between 1960 and 1989, about 30% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s highly skilled personnel, an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 people, left for Europe and North America. 

Resilient, despite the “brain drain,” by the late 2000s, many African countries took full advantage of the mobile computing era, which has created a more connected and tech-enabled continent. 

Although millions of Africans have moved to Europe and the US since the turn of the century, the “West” is becoming a revolving door. A new generation of African professionals, optimistic about the continent’s future, is on the horizon. Case in point, Tavonga Muchuchuti, a Botswana nationalist who returned home after attending university in the UK, to create Xavier Africa. 

Xavier Africa is a Botswana bespoke software development agency that identifies and solves inefficiencies in African companies using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Set to reshape the continent, artificial intelligence can help organizations improve and scale their decision-making process. And plug-in many of the continent’s infrastructure gaps.

Today a large portion of Africans still don’t have access to proper health care. Xavier Africa hopes to address this with their product Teledoc. An application that uses IoT, data analytics, and machine learning to help individuals with chronic illnesses monitor their condition in real-time to improve their health and life expectancy.

I spoke with Tavonga Muchuchuti, founder of Xavier Africa, about Teledoc, what it takes to build successful software solutions in Africa, and his thoughts on tech in Botswana.      

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Journey to Xavier Africa

I graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, top of my class in finance. But my junior year, I realized that a lot of the stuff we were doing in school, like calculating vars and probability matrices, was being automated by the largest hedge funds and investment banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. So I figured I was wasting my time with finance.

Around that time, I also discovered artificial intelligence and decided to start Xavier Agency. We are a software development agency that specializes in creating bespoke software solutions. We go into companies, mainly banks, investment firms, parastatals, do a complete scan and diagnosis, and then create custom solutions using different technologies. 

In Botswana, most organizations don’t have a standard way of storing their data, but they all talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). We realized for companies to participate in 4IR, we had to create the infrastructure, sort their data, and start moving their documents to the cloud. 

We’ve been working with companies for the past three years, and although it’s exciting solving different problems, we realized there was a ceiling, especially here in Africa. The work is limited and becoming more volatile as Indian offshore development companies flood the local market. 

Last year, we decided to start using the money that we made from our development agency and start building our own solutions and taking them to market. We’re currently bootstrapping a solution called Teledoc. Half the company will continue creating bespoke solutions for companies to bring in money, while the other half works on Teledoc.  

How do you remain grounded in your approach to software development? 

As a dev and a solutions person, you want to solve problems. And you hope that everything will align to allow you to solve the problem the way you want. But we have to be realistic when building, especially building for Africa. I think that’s why many organizations from the West don’t succeed in this market because they don’t understand the fundamentals.

Number one, data is extremely expensive. Two, you’ve got a large population of people who will only use WhatsApp and Facebook. Three, you’ve also got a large population of people who are too scared to experiment and use new things. And part of that is not their fault. People here are still struggling to get a loaf of bread. And for many, until they get that loaf, they have no room to think about using a new app on the market. 

So there’s a lot of realism that comes with building for Africa. I’ll give an example with Teledoc. The main objective is to reach all individuals with chronic illnesses, heart disease, diabetes, and other diseases that need constant monitoring. The population that we’re targeting a majority of the people are above 60 and live in rural areas.

Although that’s our perfect demographic and the biggest part of the problem, we’ve been forced to focus on top-level executives in the towns and cities. Because they’ll be more receptive to new technology and typically have a Wi-Fi connection at home, which is way cheaper than data. Once we solve it for them and gain some traction, we plan to raise funds, create our own wearable devices, and expand to our ideal client base. 

What is Teledoc?

First, I’ll share the story of how Teledoc came about. My grandmother has had diabetes for the past 20 years. She checks her blood pressure and sugar levels every morning and visits her doctor once every three months. But last year, because of the pandemic, three months turned to six months.

During that time, she fell sick, and her condition got a little more critical. Thinking about how we could have helped her avoid a situation like this, I realized there’s only so much insight you can gain from measuring your blood pressure twice a day.

I looked into wearable tech like smartwatches and smart rings to see how it could provide more insight into someone’s health. They can measure many of the vital signs a doctor would use to assess a patient’s condition, like heart rate, blood pressure, and temperature, to name a few.

The idea with Teledoc was to measure all these vital signs in real-time, collect the data, and use AI to identify patterns and potential risks. Patients will have a red, amber, or green status, and when they elevate to red status, we’ll immediately alert their doctor, who will have access to it via a web application. 

We also added a feature where patients could log their symptoms and share the medication they are taking. Using all this data, we hope to help doctors make better diagnoses. I know one heart specialist that has fifteen thousand patients. It’s almost impossible to monitor them all. Our web application will give context to doctors and help them make better decisions. 

The biggest challenge you faced building Teledoc?

Since we’re bootstrapping and trying to balance building Teledoc with running the agency, we haven’t made the progress that we would have liked. As much as we said, half the team will build Teledoc while the other half builds solutions for companies, it hasn’t been realistic.

The pressure on the money-making side and the need to keep on the lights has often required the entire team to focus on our client work. Since all our staff is on salary, we need business to make sure that everyone can survive. If I could count how long we’ve worked on Teledoc cumulatively since August last year, it’d be a month and a half.