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Meet the woman bringing AI to Mongolia’s nomadic herders www.cnn.com
It might have seemed an unlikely statement for a speaker at a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel discussing the development of artificial intelligence, but Bolor-Erdene Battsengel opened her contribution by talking about her livestock. “I come from a herder community, I still own 300 sheep,” the 32-year-old former Mongolian government official said on Monday at the annual WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
It was a fitting introduction to explain to the audience why she’s so passionate about her work on digital inclusion in Mongolia, a democratic country sandwiched between Russia and China, where about 30% of the 3.5 million inhabitants are nomadic herders.
Battsengel is the founder of AI Academy Asia, which aims to train 500 teachers to provide AI education to rural communities in Mongolia, and will hold its official launch event on January 27. “If we can give people access to equal education … it can create enormous impact,” she told CNN.
For decades, experts have warned of a growing digital divide between people with access to computers and the Internet, and those without. Globally, 2.2 billion children and young people don’t have access to the Internet at home. In Mongolia, about 84% of the population uses the Internet.
Almost 40% of jobs around the world could be affected by AI, according to the chief of International Monetary Fund, who also warned in a blog post last year that “AI will likely worsen overall inequality.”
Some observers are cautioning that the benefits could be skewed in favor of countries with the financial might to plow into research and development, infrastructure like computing resources, and English-speaking nations.
Battsengel worries about the impact that imbalance will have in Mongolia, where there are other social disparities.
“Schools in the countryside, they do not have computer science teachers,” she says. “We have education inequality, we have income inequality, we have gender inequality … if you add digital inequality, it will create the gap so much bigger and I think that’s so unfair to children growing up in these communities around the world.”
Equality in AI
Battsengel, who is a member of the WEF Forum of Young Global Leaders, told CNN that she has experienced firsthand the power of education. Born in a rural Mongolian community, she moved with her family to the country’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, at the age of 10.
She faced bullying for her rural roots, so she threw herself into her studies and skipped three grades, finishing high school at the age of 14. At 29, she became the first Vice Minister of Digital Development – and the youngest member of Mongolia’s government.
In that role, she spearheaded the “E-Mongolia” initiative to digitize services so people in remote areas could do things like renew their passports and file their taxes online, instead of traveling long distances to government offices.
In 2021, Battsengel founded Girls Code, a non-profit that provides coding bootcamps and mentoring to girls aged between 16 and 18 from nomadic and disadvantaged communities in Mongolia.
Girls Code has produced 120 graduates, some of whom have gone on to study at Harvard, MIT and Cambridge, created apps, and founded startups, according to Battsengel.
With AI Academy Asia, she hopes to scale up that work, extending its reach to more people, including boys, so they can leverage AI in their work and studies.
That could be vital as the technology upends the way people across the world work and live. Trends such as technological change and demographic shifts are expected to generate 78 million new jobs by 2030, with some of the fastest growth in technology, data, and AI, according to the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report 2025.
But making sure that the benefits of AI are shared equally requires tailoring national AI strategies to local challenges, according to “Blueprint for Intelligent Economies,” a report launched by WEF at Davos, in collaboration with KPMG.
AI Academy Asia has developed curriculums to teach herders practical skills, says Battsengel. Last winter, a weather phenomenon called “dzud” that causes extreme winter conditions, killed millions of cattle, sheep, yaks, horses and goats in Mongolia – threatening the livelihoods of its herders.
By learning how to leverage AI to predict weather and manage the health of their livestock, herders might be better able to withstand future dzuds, she says.
Battsengel adds: “I really hope that they use the knowledge (of AI), even in the countryside, to really improve their quality of life.”
Published Date:2025-01-29
