Year in Review: Lacuna Fund’s Grantee Convening and 2024 Highlights
17 December 2024
As 2024 draws to a close, our Secretariat team is reflecting on all of the amazing work that took place this year in the AI for good space. From new Lacuna Fund machine learning datasets becoming available across multiple domains to the many events, hackathons, webinars, challenges, and community engagement activities across the globe, we are heading into the new year inspired. Whether you are a data scientist, entrepreneur, linguist, or student, we are grateful for your interest and engagement in Lacuna Fund’s work.
We are so grateful to the funders who make more equitable dataset creation possible through Lacuna Fund. We are thankful, as well, for our grantees, Hubs, partners, Technical Advisory Panelists, storytelling collaborators, and wider AI for social impact community.
Look back with us at some of our highlights from the past year!
Lacuna Fund’s 3rd Annual Grantee Convening in New York City
One of our brightest highlights of this year was our third annual Grantee Convening, held on the margins of New York Climate Week, which brought together Lacuna Fund’s Climate grantees to learn from and connect with one another. Almost 30 data scientists and social entrepreneurs — working on projects at the intersection of climate and energy, forests, or health — gathered from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
In addition to grantee presentations, our amazing partners presented sessions on data quality, use cases, gender bias in AI, earth observation, and climate change and AI.
Reflecting on the convening, grantees shared one word or phrase that captured their time together. Check out their thoughts above!
Grantee Convening Social Media Challenge Winners – Rose Nakasi, Pia Faustino, Anica Araneta!
These three grantees received the most engagement on their social posts about the convening! Congratulations Pia, Rose, and Anica! Thank you for sharing your reflections.
Points of Connection – Memorable Events in 2024
Steering Committee Meets in NYC
Lacuna Fund’s Steering Commitee met on the margins of both Climate Week and the Grantee Convening to discuss the future of Lacuna Fund and opportunities on the horizon. We are grateful to Vukosi Marivate, Teki Akuetteh, Shikoh Gitau, Balthas Seibold, Gillian Dowie, Renata Avila, and Hadar Shemtov for their service on the Steering Commitee. In addition, we appreciate their expert perspectives and innovative spirit, along with their commitment to guiding Lacuna Fund’s vision and growth.
Deep Learning Indaba in Dakar, Senegal
Our Project Director, Jennifer Pratt Miles, spoke at Deep Learning Indaba – the annual meeting of the African machine learning and AI community – about novel approaches for scaling dataset creation, use cases, and lessons learned from Lacuna Fund grantees working on African languages.
Health AI Bias Symposium & Datathon at Emory University
Jennifer travelled to Atlanta, Georgia for a symposium and datathon hosted by Emory University’s Healthcare Innovation and Translational Informatics Lab. Both events focused on AI bias in healthcare and medicine and ways to mitigate this.
This two-day event was organized and convened by Lacuna Fund grantees and HITI Lab Directors Dr. Judy Gichoya and Dr. Hari Trivedi– pictured with Jennifer is Dr. Judy Wawira Gichoya.
During the datathon, Jennifer spent time with a diverse team composed of a doctor, nurse, computer science professor, data science students, communications professional, and National Institutes of Health (NIH) program coordinator. It was an amazing window into the pioneering work being done by Lacuna Fund grantees to make machine learning and AI less biased and more representative, accurate, and equitable.
MILESTONES
This year was full of important milestones — new datasets, domains, storytelling initiatives, and more!
New Datasets – In 2024, Lacuna Fund grantees released nine new datasets across multiple domains!
2024 RFPs – We launched two new Requests for Proposals for Natural Language Processing (our third NLP cohort!) and the brand-new Antimicrobial Resistance domain!
Introduction of Lacuna Fund Hubs – For the first time, Lacuna Fund partnered with two organizations in Africa and Latin America as part of our strategy to share leadership with institutions in the regions where datasets are created. We are grateful to the African Center for Technology Studies (ACTS) and Centro Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial (CENIA) for their support helping us manage our 2024 requests for proposals.
Funding Awards – We announced awards for our Sexual, Reproductive and Maternal Health and Rights (SRMHR) and Climate and Forests grantees!
Lacuna Fund in the Press – This post from Meridian Institute (Lacuna Fund’s fiscal sponsor) highlights amazing talks, articles, and initiatives that feature Lacuna Fund grantees or partners – including spotlights at TedX and Gates Foundation.
Grantee Videos – We released two grantee spotlight videos (in collaboration with Emergence Creative)!
Zindi Competitions with Lacuna Fund Datasets – This year, we collaborated with our wonderful partners at Zindi to launch two public challenges: one for crop damage classification and one for malaria detection. The crop dataset is from grantees at IFPRI and ACRE Africa – Benson Mbuthia, Lilian Waithaka, and Berber Kramer. The Malaria dataset is from grantee Dr. Rose Nakasi and the team at Makerere University.
2025 Looks Bright
Reflecting on our year at Lacuna Fund only shines a brighter light on the incredible work being done in the larger “artificial intelligence for good” ecosystem. With so many rapidly expanding nodes of impact, innovation, and connection that continue to build momentum on one another, there is no doubt that 2025 is looking bright – and full of opportunity.
Wishing you a restful holiday season and rejuvenating New Year,
The Lacuna Fund Secretariat
