For twelve years, Jihane Ouhejjou worked in enterprise technology. A director of Morocco’s BTechnologie center, an exclusive partner of Bouygues Telecom, for one of the country’s largest telecom operations. But today, when a water pipeline starts leaking underground in a Moroccan city, an AI system that Ouhejjou built catches it first before anyone notices.
Ouhejjou is one of the over 150 African women entrepreneurs who enrolled in and completed the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – African Women in Technology and Artificial Intelligence (UNESCO-AWITAI) program. The training cut across 35 African countries between 2022 and 2025. She didn’t have to leave her career in enterprise technology to build her AI-powered leak detection system for water networks—MAEIA. She built it alongside her career, a career that gave her the exact knowledge the problem needed.
Inside UNESCO’s AWITAI Program
AWITAI was launched through a partnership between UNESCO, the AI Movement research centre at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco, and the OCP Foundation, which is a non-profit organization established by the OCP Group in Morocco and one of the leading phosphate and fertilizer producers in the world.
The program has had three cohorts. The first cohort, which ran from 2022 to 2023, trained 34 women from 11 countries. In the second cohort, the number of trainees increased to 80 from 28 countries from 2023 to 2024. In 2025, 30 women were trained in the third and final cohort.
According to UNESCO data, over 150 women entrepreneurs from 35 African countries have completed the program. All participants received training in AI fundamentals, data science, and applied machine learning with tailored incubation support for the strongest projects. From the group of participants, a panel of UNESCO and AI Movement specialists selected 30 standout entrepreneurs for grants ranging from $10,000 to $30,000. These entrepreneurs also received fundraising coaching and technical mentoring to help transition their ideas.
The projects that emerged from AWITAI spanned across water management, public health, cybersecurity, disability access, agriculture, and renewable energy. This reflects UNESCO’s goal of not simply teaching African women how to use AI but also giving them the necessary support, skills, and network to turn local problems into practical and beneficial products.
In the selection criteria, applicants were expected to have either an existing idea or an early-stage venture specifically focused on solving a local problem. Successful applicants completed technical training in AI and data science first before moving to the incubation phase. The strongest projects were then matched with mentors and fundraising coaches before grant recipients were selected.
That structure explains something important about the women who were successful in the program. They were not newcomers to their fields. AWITAI’s real value was helping women with deep knowledge in telecom infrastructure, public health research, materials chemistry, and other fields to apply that same expertise gained already to AI-powered solutions.
The Founders
Jihane Ouhejjou
Ouhejjou describes AWITAI as “more than a program but a pan-African movement of women using technology to address health, water, climate, inclusion, and education” via her LinkedIn during the UNESCO’s AI Day event in Paris this spring. That vision is reflected in how she talks about MAEIA.
For Ouhejjou, she stated that water is a question of dignity and sovereignty for Morocco and the continent and not just an engineering problem. MAEIA uses sensors installed across pipeline networks. These sensors are built to monitor pressure, flow, and vibration in real time. The AI models trained on that data detect unusual patterns, making it possible to detect leaks before they either become expensive or cause disruptive failures.
Ouhejjou is currently developing the product with a hardware partner in Morocco, moving it from prototype to something water utilities could deploy at scale.
Thokozile Manaka
Thokozile Manaka’s path into AWITAI is totally different compared to Ouhejjou. She works with the Africa CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), and a PhD candidate at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She researches natural language processing for health data.
Her journey into AI didn’t just begin with AWITAI. It began in 2022 where she co-authored a study titled “Using Machine Learning to Fuse Verbal Autopsy Narratives and Binary Features in the Analysis of Deaths from Hyperglycemia,” exploring the same type of AI methods that now power her project, MultiVA (Multi Verbal Autopsies).
Verbal autopsies are structured interviews used to determine the cause of death, especially where formal death registration systems are limited or even non-existent. Most deaths in Africa happen outside healthcare facilities, as such, MultiVA provides one of the few ways to understand why people are dying. Manaka’s AI system is designed to help public health systems produce credible causes of death through accurately analysed data. enabling governments and health organisations to make informed decisions about disease prevention and healthcare planning. For Manaka, AWITAI was an opportunity to take her years of academic research beyond the laboratory and into the real world public health systems.
Marielle Agbahoungbata
Marielle Agbahoungbata had already built an impressive academic career before joining the programme. She holds a PhD in inorganic chemistry from the University of Abomey Calavi in Benin. Her research focused on titanium dioxide-based materials for wastewater purification. She is both a professor at the University of Abomey Calavi and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich today.
In 2017, she won the international “Ma These en 180 Secondes” science communication competition and co-founded X-TechLab, an X-ray research laboratory in Cotonou. Her AWITAI project called WaTAIR, is an AI-powered water sanitation robot developed with the Beninese company SSaFE to improve wastewater treatment. In Africa Radio Technology March 2026 feature, Agbahoungbata traced WaTAIR back to a simple goal: making clean water accessible to everyone.
Hanane Yaagoubi
Hanane Yaagoubi also entered AWITAI with years of expertise in her field. Armed with a PhD in engineering sciences from Mohammed V University, specializing in additive manufacturing and 3D printing, and an affiliated professor at UM6P’s campus in Benguerir, her AWITAI project combines AI with 3D concrete printing to support eco-housing. Machine learning helps optimize how construction printers lay down material, reducing both building costs and waste while supporting more sustainable housing development.
By the time she joined the program, Yaagoubi had already built an impressive research career. She received the L’Oréal–UNESCO Maghreb Young Talent Prize in 2023 before winning the AWITAI African Women in Tech and AI Award in 2024.
For Yaagoubi, AI wasn’t an entirely new field to explore. It became another tool she could apply to a discipline she had already spent years developing, this time with Africa’s housing shortage in mind.
Aminata Dembele
Aminata Dembele is a PhD researcher in electrical engineering at the Pan-African University Institute for Basic Sciences, Technology, and Innovation in Kenya. Her research focuses on AI-driven cybersecurity, specifically on how machine learning can detect distributed denial-of-service attacks on software-defined networks.
Her AWITAI initiative, Massa Mousso, which is roughly translated as “Queens of Technologies,” uses that technical background in a different way. The program trains women and girls in digital literacy and AI skills across Mali.
Dembele believes closing Africa’s AI gender gap means creating a much larger pipeline of women with strong technical skills who can build the next generation of innovations. That’s why Massa Mousso measures its success by how many women it equips with the knowledge to participate in the AI ecosystem.
What it Means for Africa’s AI Pipeline
The projects that came out of AWITAI, from Ouhejjou’s leak detection system to Manaka’s health data models, Agbahoungbata’s water sanitation robot, Yaagoubi combining AI with 3D-printed construction, and Dembele helping more women gain digital and AI skills are real businesses solving real problems.
But the program also enters an ecosystem where the next step is the hardest. Building an AI startup requires more than technical skills. Beyond the technical skills, founders need access to funding, infrastructure, customers, and investors that are willing to back early stage ideas. For many women entrepreneurs in Africa, those opportunities remain limited.
According to data, in 2025, African startups founded exclusively by women received just 0.9% of the continent’s $3.2 billion in venture funding. The lowest share in four years. The figure rises to 2.2% only when looking at startups with a female CEO.
This becomes more glaring, especially when grant funding is removed. Since grants accounted for more than half of the funding raised by women-led startups in early 2025, their share of private investment drops to around 0.7%. These figures show that the problem is not proving
One of the strongest voices addressing this issue of investment is Linda Obi, who is the Executive Director of BigCheq Consulting. She argues based on the evidence that shows women-led African startups often operate more efficiently than those led by men. They achieve better results even with lower operating costs. She says the funding gap isn’t about performance alone but about structure. Because few African venture capital firms have women in senior decision-making positions, funding decisions continue to point out these long-standing biases within the investment ecosystem.
Though grants can help founders build prototypes, validate ideas, and launch businesses, without a clearly defined investment pathway, they risk becoming a limit instead of a stepping stone. That raises an important question for such a program like AWITAI: what happens after the training ends?
The Structural Barriers Training Alone Can’t Fix
All the featured founders of AWITAI did not need convincing that AI could solve real problems. They had already built working prototypes and spent years researching their fields by the time they entered the program. They now face challenges that the ten-month training program cannot solve on its own.
Access to capital still remains one of the biggest challenges that requires immediate attention. Many investors still hesitate to fund early-stage AI ventures in Africa, especially those led by women; even founders with promising products struggle to secure the necessary investment needed to scale.
Infrastructure is another obstacle to be considered. AI solutions development is dependent on reliable and stable internet, computing power, quality data, and digital infrastructure. These resources are not equally available across the African continent. This makes it harder for founders to develop and deploy their products in some markets.
Women remain underrepresented among startup founders, investors, technology executives, and decision-makers, an imbalance that directly influences who receives funding, whose ideas are taken seriously, and which innovations get the opportunity to grow.
UNESCO’s own research carried out across ten African countries shows that women-led businesses continue to face greater barriers compared to their male counterparts in accessing digital opportunities. A program like AWITAI that has provided technical skills, mentoring, and confidence can also help founders build stronger businesses and expand their networks but may not be able to change the investment landscape that determines whether those businesses can survive on their own.
What Comes Next
UNESCO has described it as its final cohort for AWITAI, the third cohort that was completed in 2025. Their focus, according to the organization, now shifts from training new participants to strengthening the network that has already been built.
Through a shared experience of building AI-driven solutions, more than 150 women from 35 African countries are now connected. These relationships will lead to collaborations, partnerships, and knowledge sharing in the future, long after the program has ended.
Another gap is that there is no guaranteed pathway from AWITAI’s training and grant support to accelerator programs, venture capital, and broader market access.
That is the stage these founders are navigating today; Ouhejjou needs investment to expand her project into a scalable technology that water utilities can deploy. Agbahoungbata needs WaTAIR to be manufactured and adopted more widely. If AI-assisted 3D printing is to become part of Africa’s construction industry, Yaagoubi’s work must move beyond research demonstrations only. For Manaka, the challenge is slightly different. Her work depends more on convincing public health institutions across Africa to adopt this new approach to analyzing mortality data and less on venture capital. Dembele requires consistent funding for her Massa Mousso project.
AWITAI proved that African women already had AI expertise in their different fields. For Africa’s innovative ecosystem, the hardest parts and questions are: Will the potential of women-led AI businesses be recognized by investors? Will governments and institutions create opportunities that will ensure that these solutions reach the people who truly need them? Will accelerators and venture capital firms provide the support that will help promising startups become sustainable companies? Though the 150 women who completed AWITAI have already answered the question the program set out to ask. The African tech ecosystem, still funding women-founded startups at under 1% of total capital, is the one still being asked to prove that it’s paying attention.
Staff writer at Women Digest covering beauty, fashion, wellness and life.