From ZAKA Graduates to AI for Good Finalists: Afiyah Solution

We are proud to spotlight Mohamad Ali and Lara, two ZAKA graduates from Lebanon who showed that the right skills can take you anywhere. They secured their spot as finalists in startAD’s AI for Good Sandbox by developing Afiyah, an innovative AI solution for the health industry. Read more about their journey.

We are Mohamad Ali and Lara, two AI engineers from Lebanon and the team behind Afiyah Solution. After graduating with a Bachelor’s in Data Science from the Lebanese University and currently pursuing our M1 in Computer Science, we joined the ZAKA AI Certification Program in 2024, completing the Machine Learning track together. The program strengthened our technical foundation and shaped how we build AI products, especially through our capstone project: an interactive voice-call system featuring Lebanese actress Maguy Bou Ghosn.

In September 2025, the AI for Good Sandbox, organized by startAD and supported by global partners, launched a national innovation challenge focused on building AI solutions that advance SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being.

Encouraged by what we learned at ZAKA, we applied to the Sandbox to challenge ourselves in a real-world, impact-driven environment. We were honored to be selected for the finals among the top teams from over 1,000 applicants, and we chose a case from the Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority (ECA) “Homegrown Health Heroes” focused on supporting parents in managing their children’s daily well-being which is a problem with meaningful social value in the region.

Building Afiyah: Using GenAI to Fight Childhood Obesity

Our solution, Afiyah, is a bilingual family health companion designed to help parents tackle childhood obesity by improving nutrition and reducing screen time. Built with Flask and powered by Google Gemini and OpenAI GPT (gpt-oss-20b), Afiyah offers personalized meal recommendations based on available ingredients, age-appropriate screen-free activities, a real-time AI parenting assistant, and a family dashboard to track healthy habits. Cultural relevance, practicality, and personalization were at the heart of our design.

How We Turned Certification into Creation

The skills we gained at ZAKA played a direct role in bringing Afiyah to life. Prompt engineering, LLM integration, backend development, and ML in production were all tools we learned through the AI Certification Program and used daily during the hackathon. More importantly, ZAKA taught us how to think, plan, and build under pressure, exactly the mindset needed to succeed in the Sandbox.

Reaching the finals was a meaningful milestone. It boosted our confidence, expanded our network, and proved that the skills we developed at ZAKA can translate into real-world impact.

To future ZAKA students: trust the process. The real win isn’t just the prize; it’s the skills, confidence, and opportunities that open up when you push yourself to build something that truly matters.