Shamiri Institute unveils AI-powered mental health platform for youth across Africa

Known as shamiriAI, the homegrown artificial intelligence system was unveiled during the 2025 Shamiri Summit in Nairobi. It aims to reach 10 million youth by 2032, addressing one of the continent’s most urgent healthcare challenges — limited access to mental health services.

Africa faces a growing mental health crisis, with a shortage of trained professionals and the high cost of care keeping support out of reach for many. In Kenya, fewer than 500 psychiatrists serve a population of more than 50 million, while studies indicate that up to one in two young people experience mental health difficulties.

“shamiriAI is not a replacement for human care but an amplifier,” said Tom Osborn, Founder and CEO of Shamiri Institute. “It supports therapists, personalizes treatment, and helps design more effective interventions through data.”

The platform enhances therapy in three ways by analyzing therapy sessions to give real-time feedback to therapists, using predictive models to match clients with the most effective treatments, and mapping symptom patterns to guide the development of new, targeted interventions.

To ensure cultural and linguistic relevance, Shamiri’s team built an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model capable of handling English, Swahili, and Sheng — a common blend of both languages used by Kenyan youth. This allows the system to accurately analyze multilingual therapy conversations, a first in Africa’s mental health technology space.

The shamiriAI platform builds on Shamiri’s community-based mental health model, which has already reached over 185,000 young people across Kenya through school-based interventions led by trained peer providers aged 18 to 22. The approach has been shown to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression by up to 80 percent at a cost of just KSh 1,000 ($7) per person.

French Ambassador to Kenya and Somalia Arnaud Suquet hailed the initiative as an example of Africa’s growing leadership in responsible AI innovation. “Kenya has the talent and infrastructure to lead in AI for public good. Shamiri’s model reaches young people where they are, at a fraction of traditional therapy costs,” he said.