INVESTMENT
LACUNA FUND BACKS SIX AFRICAN PROJECTS BUILDING AGRICULTURAL DATASETS FOR AI Lacuna Fund, the world’s first collaborative fund aiming to correct gaps and biases in data for artificial intelligence (AI), in January announced the first round of funding to support datasets for more equitable and accessible AI for agriculture.
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acuna Fund was co-founded in 2020 by The Rockefeller Foundation, Google.org, and Canada’s International Development Research Centre with a mandate to provide data scientists, researchers, and social entrepreneurs in low-and middle income contexts globally with the resources they need to produce labeled datasets that address urgent problems in their communities. Lacuna Fund is working to fill data gaps in three main domains, namely language, agriculture, and health. The fund said its first round of funding in the agricultural AI for social good domain will support pioneering efforts solving urgent local problems in African countries while leading to a step change in machine learning’s potential around the world. A representative from Lacuna Fund said the six projects represent a total of $1.1-million in funding.
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“The recipients of this first round of funding are unlocking the power of machine learning to alleviate food security challenges, spur economic opportunities, and give researchers, farmers, communities, and policymakers access to superior agricultural datasets. We are proud to support their work,” the fund said on its website. Lacuna Fund said it had received over 100 applications from , or in partnership with organisations across Africa. Lacuna Fund’s Technical Advisory Panel (TAP) selected the six recipients using criteria based on the fund’s principles, namely: quality, transformational impact, equity, participatory approach, ethics, efficiency, feasibility, accessibility, and sustainability. “It’s clear that the demand for high-quality and representative labeled training data is high, and the expertise and groundwork needed to collect and deploy
it is growing by the day,” said Lacuna Fund. The fund said all datasets produced will be locally developed and owned and will also be openly accessible to the international data community. Lacuna Fund explained that it aims to match project teams with in-kind capacity building, and technical support as needed and available. Mutembesa Daniel, research scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Research lab at Makerere University and a member of the Technical Advisory Panel, said he was very proud of the work being done by the cohort. “I look forward to seeing the glass ceiling between francophone and anglophone parts of Africa being broken, to seeing data scientists from these different parts of Africa starting to work with each other across regions,” he added. Another member of the Technical Advisory Panel, AllSightsAfrica executive
