Maha Jouini

Tunisia

This researcher has transformed her battle with illness into an opportunity to explore AI in healthcare, for the benefit of African women.

A human rights advocate in Tunisia and vice-president of the Francophone and African Agency for Artificial Intelligence (AFRIA), where she works in particular on AI’s impact on African societies and on promoting inclusive AI, Maha Jouini learned in 2025, at the age of 38, that she had stage 2 hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer. The disease affects an increasing number of women each year across the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, where only five countries have established screening programmes. Maha Jouini could not help but notice how heavily digital tools rely on Western datasets, making them poorly suited to African healthcare realities and ultimately disadvantaging patients across the continent. With remarkable resilience, the researcher decided to draw on her own experience of living with the disease to create, alongside doctors and researchers from different African countries, a healthcare platform. CHIFAA (“healing”) is a tool designed for women in North Africa facing breast and cervical cancer. Developed in a multidialectal form of Arabic, it is designed around the region’s cultural realities. No patient should be denied access to data because of her language, culture or living environment, the researcher argues. Through CHIFAA, she also seeks to demonstrate that AI solutions can be developed in Africa. “Technology alone cannot guarantee justice; we must place human dignity at the heart of technological progress.” In 2022, UNESCO named her one of the 20 pioneering women driving change in the MENA region. She has also received the She Shapes AI Award.