The Rockefeller Foundation has announced a three-year, $5.5 million collaboration with e-GUIDE and Atlas AI to use satellite data and artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate economic development and promote climate resilient infrastructure investment across sub-Saharan Africa. 

The effort aims to produce a digital platform that will build on new research and publicly available data sets covering the nexus of agriculture, energy, and transportation sector development conditions across the region to provide policy makers with extensive cross-sectoral insight and promote economic opportunities. To that end, the platform will start by covering Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Uganda and gather insight into the well-being of communities in each country. 

“While data science has been used to improve individual development projects, we haven’t yet unlocked its potential to improve development at a systems level—which is critical, because efforts to drive change in energy, agriculture, and transportation must be integrated in order to make opportunity universal and sustainable,” said Rockefeller Foundation senior vice president of innovation Zia Khan. “We are excited about the potential of this collaboration to give policymakers, investors, and operators more dynamic situational awareness of local conditions and help them improve those conditions for the people they serve.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/gorodenkoff)