As a teenager, she loved video games. Now she uses AI to fight malaria.

When she was just a teenager, Rokhaya Diagne retreated to her brother’s room, where she played online computer games for hours, day after day, until her mother finally had enough.

“My mother said, ‘This is an addiction,’” Ms. Diagne said. “She said if I didn’t stop, she would send me to the hospital to see a psychiatrist.”

Her mother’s interventions worked. Although Ms. Diagne’s passion for computers has increased, she has now focused her energies on higher pursuits than reaching higher levels in Call of Duty.

Now her goals include using artificial intelligence to help the world eradicate malaria by 2030, a project she is focusing on at her healthcare startup.

Video games “taught me a lot of things,” said Ms. Diagne, 25, a Senegalese computer science major who lives in Dakar, the capital. “They gave me problem-solving skills.”

“I don’t regret playing those things,” she added.

A fast talker in jeans and hijab, Ms. Diagne is part of a subgroup of Africans huge youth population whose lives have been shaped by screens and the internet – and who are connected to the world to a degree that no generation before them could have imagined.

For young Africans interested in technology-related careers, the Internet has provided a powerful addition to an education system that some experts fear is hampering Africa’s ability to benefit from its young people. Although more students are graduating than ever before, schools still rely heavily on stand-and-deliver lectures.

The wealth of free online coding bootcamps, robotics classes and lectures from the likes of Stanford, Oxford and MIT are having a major impact across Africa, inspiring careers in tech and seeding ideas for start-ups.

While some of her cohorts are most passionate about sensor fusion or robotics, Ms. Diagne focuses on artificial intelligence and machine deep learning. She helped create an award-winning networking app that helps you meet others with similar interests, like Tinder, but for tech geeks. And she founded a startup called Afyasense (borrowing “afya,” or health, from Swahili, an East African language) for her disease detection projects using AI.

“She is someone who is a pleasure to talk to because of the quality of the questions she asks and also the answers she gives,” said Ismaïla Seck, a leader in the Senegalese government. growing AI community.

Like many young people in Africa’s technological boom, Ms. Diagne finds herself at the center of overlapping phenomena on the continent — a growing, well-educated middle class raising even better-educated children who, with every tap of a keyboard, have come to feel that the continent’s biggest problems can be solved.

Ms Diagne wants to use AI to improve health outcomes in the region, a choice she made after a series of childhood illnesses landed her in hospitals in Dakar that struggled to provide consistent, quality care.

“I know the mistakes that are unfortunately made,” she said.

Mrs. Diagne’s drive has earned her recognition. Her malaria project recently won an award an AI conference in Ghana and a national award in Senegal for social entrepreneurship, as well as $8,000 in funding.

As a child, she said she was reserved but has always had a fierce appetite for research, fueled by her father, a retired literature professor and writer. When confronted with his daughter’s questions about how the world worked or about her Muslim faith, he let her try to find the answer herself. He rewarded her with apples, still her favorite fruit.

She enrolled at the École Supérieure Polytechnique de Dakar as a biology major and interned at Dakar’s main hospital. But days of looking at lab samples made her realize that this kind of work wasn’t for her.

“I wanted a lot more challenges than being afraid of the bacteria in my body,” she said. “What I wanted was innovation and the ability to create and use my brain for something instead of predictive results that I just followed.”

Dejected that she had made the wrong choice, Mrs. Diagne dropped out of school and spent a year planning her next steps.

She remembered something her brother always told her: Do things that are harder because there is less competition. She chose bioinformatics, the science of both storing complex biological data and analyzing it to find new insights. The opportunities to study it in Senegal were extremely limited.

But the Dakar American University of Science and Technology had opened and offered a major in computer science, a field she decided would provide a solid foundation for future studies in bioinformatics.

The university’s approach emphasizes applied learning, meaning teachers assign projects to students and expect them to largely complete them on their own. And the assignments are always aimed at solving a local problem.

One project tasked students with building a drone that could carry a payload of 100 kilograms over a distance of 10 kilometers, an act that could help alleviate polluting truck congestion outside the port of Dakar. Some of the university’s joint projects have already produced promising start-ups, such as Solar boxthat started as an assignment to build a solar-powered electric motorcycle.

Ms. Diagne, who is now a senior, was tasked with sending an underwater drone to collect information on both fish and seagrass, plants that absorb carbon.

“When I started, I didn’t even know what seagrass was,” she said. “I had only seen an underwater drone in movies. I didn’t even know the difference between fish species.”

She threw herself into the project and even hired a fisherman she saw on the beach to teach her how to fish so she could learn more about different species from someone who knew firsthand. Her team moves on to the next phase: building their own underwater drone.

While looking for another project, she discovered that global health officials were working to eradicate malaria before the decade is out. One of Senegal’s biggest health problems is the lack of rapid and reliable malaria tests in rural areas. That’s why she wanted to design a better system for identifying positive cases.

Ms. Diagne recalled her boredom in the hospital laboratory, examining biological sample after sample. That rote action seemed tailor-made for AI to tackle.

First, she had to find a lab that would give her a large set of malaria-infected cells so she could train AI to read them. But some labs in Senegal are accustomed to sharing data only with researchers from abroad.

“They will openly give information to those people, but when it comes to little Africans like me who are still learning, they don’t want to help us,” Ms Diagne said.

Her school helped her find a lab worker who gave her a mobile data set that she fed into a deep learning tool, training her to detect positive cases. Users will connect microscopes to a laptop loaded with its AI program – including 3D printed microscopes that are cheap and small enough to be deployed in rural areas.

As her malaria project gets closer to market, Ms. Diagne already knows what she wants to do next: use AI to detect cancer cells.

Ms. Diagne has relied on leaders at her university and the growing technology community in West Africa, who have been eager to provide guidance as her projects gain recognition.

“They pressured me so I could go out and show the world what I do,” she said. “Well, they haven’t succeeded yet.”

But she’s heading that way. The Ghana AI conference was her first trip abroad, and she will travel to Switzerland later this month a training program for innovators to get more help in launching its malaria project.

And she’s ready to lend a hand to those who come behind her.

“A lot of people contact me and say, ‘how did you do this, how did you do that,’” she said. “I can guide them and show them the way.”