Digital Innovation, Artificial Intelligence and Climate Resilience for Mental Health: Integrating Education, Socioeconomic Determinants, Climate Change and Healthy Ageing Through AI-Enabled Primary Care Mental Health Screening

Mental disorders account for a growing share of disability in Kenya, yet specialist services remain concentrated, unequally distributed and insufficient for population need. At the same time, educational inequality, unemployment and insecure livelihoods, food and housing stress, population ageing, and recurrent droughts, floods and heat are interacting to increase distress and reduce timely access to care. This conceptual paper examines these forces as connected determinants of mental health and proposes a Kenyan model for an artificial intelligence assisted primary care decision-support tool. The proposed tool would help Community Health Promoters and frontline clinicians conduct brief, standardized and culturally responsive screening. This tool would them identify common mental disorders, cognitive impairment and climate-related psychosocial stress. It would further help them stratify urgency, provide brief education and refer people to locally available care. It would function within Kenya’s existing community and primary-care architecture, including the electronic community health systems, available Primary Care Networks and county referral pathways. The model is explicitly assistive work. Diagnosis, treatment and high-risk decisions remain with qualified practitioners. The paper describes a stepped workflow, a minimum clinical dataset, safeguards for suicide and violence risk, offline and multilingual design, and an implementation pathway from co-design through pragmatic evaluation. It argues that responsible AI can strengthen task-sharing and continuity only when accompanied by service capacity, human supervision, data protection, algorithmic monitoring, disability and age inclusion, and climate-responsive planning. Kenya’s recent primary-care, digital-health and AI policy reforms create an important opportunity. That said, technology should be evaluated by whether it improves equitable access and safe action rather than by technical performance alone.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, primary health care, mental health screening, climate resilience, healthy ageing.

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