WHO ESPEN × Sightsavers · Pilot cohort 2026

AI skills your programme keeps after the funding ends.

AMPLIFY is a seven-month course for Ministry of Health staff who run national NTD programmes. Everything it teaches runs on free tools — so what you learn stays with your team, not with a subscription.

See the seven modules The case for funders →

English & French · March – September 2026 · 16 participants, 7 countries

Module 2 · what the course actually changes
How most people ask
summarise this MDA data

Here is a general overview of your dataset. It contains treatment coverage figures across several districts and years. Overall, coverage appears to vary. You may wish to review the districts individually to identify any patterns of interest…

How AMPLIFY teaches you to ask
TaskSummarise treatment coverage for the 2025 MDA round.
Context42 districts, three years of data. Some districts are missing round two.
PersonaYou are a data officer briefing the national NTD programme manager.
FormatOne paragraph, then a table of every district below 65% — flag the gaps rather than filling them.

Same data. Same free tool. The difference is the ask — and unlike the tool, the ask is something you can teach, write down, and hand to a colleague.

The design constraint

Nothing in this course costs money to use.

That is a deliberate limit, not a compromise. AMPLIFY is built on the free tiers of general-purpose AI tools, so a programme officer in Juba and one in Accra start from the same place — and so nothing stops working when a grant closes.

No subscriptions
Free tiers only. Every exercise is designed to fit inside their limits, including the ones on message length and daily usage.
No procurement
Nothing to license, approve, or renew through a ministry finance office. A participant can start the day they finish the session.
No lock-in
The course teaches a method — stacking several tools against one problem and checking their work against each other — rather than a product. When a tool changes, the method holds.
Low bandwidth
Materials are built to be usable on the connections participants actually have, and to be re-run offline where the work allows it.
The course

Seven modules, one a month.

Two hours live, each with a worksheet and homework on real NTD data. The modules build in order — you cannot visualise data you have not cleaned.

01 · 19 Mar
AI Fundamentals for NTD Programmes
What generative AI does and does not do. Ethics, governance, data protection, and responsible use with programme data.
Delivered
02 · 16 Apr
Prompting & Data Literacy
Structuring a prompt with task, context, persona, and format. Descriptive statistics and reading your own data critically.
Delivered
03 · 21 May
Cleaning, Transformation & Analysis
Getting messy programme data into a shape you can work with — and knowing when the mess is the finding.
Delivered
04 · 18 Jun
Data Visualisation
Turning cleaned data into charts that carry a decision, not just a number.
Delivered
05 · 16 Jul
Knowledge Management
Building and deploying small AI tools for programme memory, so what one officer knows does not leave when they do.
Delivered
06 · 20 Aug
Content Creation
Presentations, training materials, and programme documents — drafted fast, then checked properly.
Delivered
07 · 17 Sep
Insights to Action
Writing, communication, and working with AI agents — turning analysis into recommendations a ministry meeting can act on.
Next session

Between sessions, participants meet their instructors in monthly check-ins and apply the work in their own technical working groups.

The cohort

Sixteen people. Seven countries.

Each participant was nominated by their own national NTD programme to be its AI focal point. Sessions and materials run in English and French.

Burkina Faso1
Côte d’Ivoire2
DR Congo3
Ethiopia3
Ghana3
South Sudan2
Togo2

Places in the pilot were allocated by national programmes rather than by open application. If you work in an NTD programme and want your country in the next cohort, the route is through your programme manager and ESPEN.

Delivered in partnership

A joint WHO ESPEN and Sightsavers initiative.

ESPEN — Expanded Special Project for Elimination of Neglected Tropical Diseases WHO’s regional project for NTD elimination in Africa, and the source of the programme data participants work with. espen.afro.who.int ↗ Sightsavers An international NGO working on NTDs, eye health, and disability inclusion, and the programme’s technical lead on AI capability. sightsavers.org ↗
For funders

What a pilot this size is actually for.

Sixteen people is not a scale claim. It is a test of one question: can national NTD programmes build durable analytical capability using tools that cost nothing — and does that capability survive contact with a real ministry workload?

What exists now
Seven modules of bilingual course material — slides, worksheets, and exercises — reusable by any programme without further development cost.
Where it sits
A trained AI focal point inside seven national NTD programmes, working with their own live data rather than a training dataset.
What is transferable
A documented method that does not depend on any one vendor, and can be taught by instructors who are not AI specialists.

Evidence section — to be completed

This is where the pilot’s results belong: pre- and post-course capability, what participants have produced with their own data since March, and what their programme managers say changed. Nothing here should be a stand-in for that. Replace this block before the site goes to any funder.

If you fund NTD programmes and want to discuss what a second cohort would take, we would rather show you the material than describe it.

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