On April 14, Salient hosted the first of 2 interactive webinars featuring live demonstrations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions addressing health supply chain challenges across Africa, as part of Salient’s ongoing research. 40 supply chain leaders and professionals joined from across government, global health institutions, and the private sector for a session that covered our initial landscape of 18 in-market AI solutions and featured a live demonstration from one of these solutions, Viebeg’s Forward Afya platform.
It’s an important time to be having this conversation.
The need for creative solutions in resource-constrained supply chains is urgent and real, as health systems across Africa grapple with stock-outs, waste, and procurement inefficiencies. At the same time, the AI space is evolving rapidly, and supply chain leaders have a limited view of how and where AI delivers the most value, how to identify high-impact use cases, and the conditions required for successful deployment.
Two key findings shaped the session. First, drawing on input from supply chain leaders across global health institutions, we identified 7 key problems where AI can deliver the most impact today: high workforce cost and skill dependency; data management and report automation; fragmented data for decision-making; suboptimal inventory levels; inefficient and manual procurement; inaccurate demand forecasting; and lack of serialization and track-and-trace.
Second, our draft landscape maps at least 18 companies with in-market solutions addressing these problems, with 50% exclusively deployed in health supply chains, and 50% deployed in emerging economies.
The session also featured a live demonstration by Viebeg, one of the 18 in-market solutions in our draft landscape. Viebeg’s Forward Afya solution addresses inefficient and manual procurement and is deployed across 51 district hospitals in Rwanda in partnership with the Ministry of Health, impacting over 8 million patients and delivering ~85% forecasting accuracy.
Watch a recap of the session below:
Our second interactive webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, May 5 at 11am ET and will feature live demonstrations from Opian Technologies and S4D Consulting. Register here to attend.
Findings from this research—covering the full landscape of solutions and practical adoption considerations for governments, global health institutions, and supply chain leaders—will be released in a report in July 2026. Sign up to our monthly newsletter to be among the first to receive it!
