Why it matters
Medical AI is trained overwhelmingly on records from Europe and North America, and its accuracy falls wherever a population is missing from those records. When leading dermatology models were tested on darker skin, their accuracy dropped sharply. Africa carries about a quarter of the world’s disease burden, and its people are almost absent from the data.
What Sankofa Core does
Sankofa Core is the integrated platform at the centre of Sankofa: more than 25 years of de-identified clinical records from multiple sources, following the same people over time and covering diagnoses, treatments, medicines, tests, admissions, pathology and imaging, mapped to FHIR R4 and OMOP. Sankofa trains and runs its own AI models on it. Sankofa Cohort, Sankofa Clinic and Sankofa Cold draw on Sankofa Core and feed their outputs back, so every service enriches the others. Sources retain ownership of their data and share in the revenue it earns.
Sources: Daneshjou and others, Science Advances, 2022; World Health Organization.
In detail
What it covers
For AI companies, researchers and pharmaceutical companies.
- DataDiagnoses, treatments, medicines, tests, admissions, pathology and imaging, curated and de-identified
- Local modelsSankofa’s own AI models, trained and run in Africa
- Synthetic dataRepresentative synthetic populations for research and model development
- StandardsMapped to FHIR R4 and OMOP
- PrivacyDe-identified for research and AI training, with POPIA-compliant processing throughout
- AttributionEvery record tagged to its source, and every use recorded
Work with us
Let’s talk.
Whether you build AI models, develop new medicines, run health services, fund health programmes or invest, we’d like to hear from you.
General enquiries: hello@sankofa.health
Media: press@sankofa.health
LinkedIn: Sankofa Health ↗
Sankofa Health (Pty) Ltd
Suite 102, 25 Richefond Circle
Ridgeside Office Estate, Umhlanga Rocks 4319
South Africa