Companies who use AI to tackle pressing and impactful challenges in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals can apply for the €600,000 programme.
Analytics for a Better World (ABW), a non-profit organisation founded in 2022 by the University of Amsterdam Business School and Dutch software and data science specialist ORTEC, has launched a €600,000 accelerator programme that aims to help non-profit organisations fast-track the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The accelerator programme will give five non-profits the chance to work with data experts and artificial intelligence (AI) tools from leading universities and technology companies, including its partners TomTom, EY, Gurobi, OMP and AEB. Each successful applicant will receive €120,000 worth of expert guidance and training to tackle future global challenges.
With less than one in five of the SDGs on track to meet the 2030 deadline, time is of the essence, according to ABW.
“Humanity is lagging behind in its progress towards the sustainable development goals. Non-profit organisations play a very important role in this, but we see that non-profits currently use much less AI and data analytics than for-profit companies,” Robert Monné, executive director of ABW, told Impact Investor. “We are launching this programme because we want to make their impact bigger and more scalable.”
Although organisations working on climate change, water access or global health have valuable data at their disposal, they often lack the time and AI and analytics expertise to unlock their full potential, according to Monné.
He went on to say that ABW is looking for non-profits who want to use AI to tackle a pressing and impactful challenge that advances the SDGs, have a feasible project from both a technological and a data perspective, and also possess strong leadership that can help to move the solution forward once they finish the programme.
The Ocean Cleanup
ABW has a track record in working with a variety of non-profit organisations. For example, ABW and ORTEC partnered with researchers from the London Business School and the University of Amsterdam in 2022 to build a predictive and prescriptive analytics model for The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch non-profit organisation dedicated to removing 90% of floating ocean plastic from the world’s oceans by 2040.
The AI-powered model is able to predict where plastic hotspots form and optimise vessel navigation in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is home to an estimated 100,000 tonnes of plastic. This has led to the reduction of the cleanup horizon from 10 years and a cost of $7.5bn (€6.4bn) to just five years and $4bn, according to ABW.
ABW has also worked with non-profits including Amref Health Africa – the continent’s largest health development non-governmental international organisation – as well as the World Health Organisation, the World Food Programme and the Red Cross on projects boosting access to health care and water. “We combined a number of data sources in our open source toolkit to make healthcare more accessible in the most cost-effective and optimal way,” Monné said.
A data science and AI training course by ABW led to Amref Health Africa, saving around €100,000 a year on mailing costs. A joint project with the WHO about accessibility of COVID-19 testing centres was published in the medical journal The Lancet.
