Google awards $25M for AI projects to achieve global development goals

Google is distributing $25 million in grants aimed at supporting nonprofit work that will use artificial intelligence to help achieve United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals such as reducing air pollution, increasing global food security, and improving maternal health care. The company’s philanthropy arm, Google.org, said Tuesday that it would provide the grant funding to 15 AI projects over the next three years. Google.org announced the grants last year as part of its Global Goals Impact Challenge. The winners include Jacaranda Health, a Kenya-based nonprofit focused on maternal and child health care. It received $1.4 million for a project that would use machine learning to refine its SMS-based digital health service that triages thousands of messages sent daily in English and Kiswahilli to ensure mothers in need of health care are connected with clinically trained agents that can provide assistance. The agents themselves are human, not AI. The funding will also be used to deploy the organization’s services in four new African languages. "We know gaps in maternal and newborn health could be addressed by AI, yet few have been adapted to our settings to ensure equitable access,” Jay Patel, Jacaranda Health’s head of technology, said in a statement to Devex. “We’re excited to be working with Google to advance the field of generative AI, ensuring every mother accesses the right information and support during and after pregnancy,” he said. Other recipients include IDinsight, a global advisory, data analytics, and research organization that received a $1.1 million grant to use AI to help reduce maternal mortality rates in South Africa. The International Rice Research Institute also received a $2 million grant for its work in the Philippines to identify methods for developing climate-resilient rice varieties. Each applicant was eligible to receive up to $3 million. Only the India-based nonprofit Wadhwani AI received the full $3 million for its efforts to work with the Indian government to deploy an AI-driven app to identify pests that can destroy cotton crops. Use of the app can reduce pesticide use and mitigate the threat of hunger for the millions of rural farmers that rely on cotton crops. Wadhwani AI has received multiple awards from Google.org, including a $2 million grant for the same AI-powered pest management app in 2019. The applications were reviewed by Google subject matter experts and selected based on their “potential impact and scale” as well as alignment with Google’s AI Principles and recommendations for Responsible AI Practices, a spokesperson said. Each of the 15 organizations share Google’s vision for using AI to accelerate progress on SDGs and each “brings their own expertise to help move the needle,” James Manyika, Google’s senior vice president of research, technology and society, said in a statement to Devex. He has been a champion of the company’s AI philanthropy work. “We are inspired by the possibilities they see for how AI can be harnessed to help people solve societal problems, and are excited about the collective impact they will have over the next three years.” This latest call was prompted by the acute awareness that the world is now at the halfway point for achieving the SDGs, which were created in 2012, and yet behind on almost all of them, said Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink, who leads Google.org’s work to use AI and other technologies to address global challenges. “I think it’s important to say that we don’t think AI is a solution to every Sustainable Development Goal or every problem in the world, but we have seen in the past work that we’ve done that it can really accelerate some of the ways that organizations are able to achieve their work,” she told Devex. For some organizations, such as Jacaranda Health, AI allows them to scale up human efforts and better equip front-line workers with the information that they need to do their jobs effectively, she said. AI also can be a useful tool for analyzing and parsing vast amounts of data such as what the International Rice Research Institute is doing as it works to identify new types of rice for crop modification, Hoyer Gosselink said. Since 2018, Google.org has been providing grant funding globally for AI projects aimed at promoting social good. The organization estimates that it has donated over $100 million in grants and 160,000 pro bono and volunteer hours to AI projects. Google also has a fellowship program that allows employees to do pro bono work with grantees for up to six months. According to Hoyer Gosselink, Google.org grantees have told the organization that using AI has helped them reach their goals in a third of the time, at half of the cost. Past recipients include Uganda’s Makerere University for a project that used AI to improve air quality monitoring and forecasting. Colombia’s Universidad del Rosario also received a grant for a project that used satellite imagery and machine learning to identify illegal mines.