Looking Back, Looking Forward: Read Lacuna Fund’s Evaluation Report
11 December 2023Lacuna Fund Evaluation Report & Upcoming Zindi Webinar
In this newsletter, read about our recently published Evaluation Report by Data Innovators and register for Zindi’s upcoming webinar to meet the challenge competition winners and discuss advances in Parts-of-Speech tagging for Luo and Setswana!
In this newsletter, read about our recently published Evaluation Report and Infographic by Data Innovators and register for Zindi’s upcoming webinar to meet the challenge competition winners and discuss advances in Parts-of-Speech tagging for Luo and Setswana!
Lacuna Fund Evaluation Report (2020-2022): Read the report!
OVERVIEW
This year (January – August 2023), South African-based consultants Data Innovators performed an evaluation of Lacuna Fund’s activities and funded projects from 2020-2022. Funding opportunities in 2023 and beyond were not included in the evaluation; however, Data Innovators attended the 2023 Grantee Convening in Kigali, Rwanda to gain further insights.
This report aims to assess what aspects of Lacuna Fund have effectively and efficiently enabled the creation, expansion, and maintenance of representative and unbiased training datasets for ML; examine process challenges experienced by stakeholders; and provide recommendations for improvement. If you want to see highlights, take a look at this report’s accompanying infographic.
The above graphic shows the domains included in this evaluation.
Fun Facts (Check out the infographic for more!)
Countries Reached:
- From 2020-2022, 54 countries in low- and middle-income contexts globally were reached for data collection. Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania host the most projects – 14, 12, 11, and 10 projects, respectively.
Dataset Cost:
- The average cost of funding a dataset ranges from $107,000 to $235,000. This varies per domain with NLP datasets averaging on the lower end ($110,000) and Climate & Health datasets on the higher end ($240,000).
Demographics:
- 34% of project leads (2020-2022) are reported to be female.
- 60% of project leads are young professionals in the early phases of their careers.
KEY FINDINGS:
Key Successes
- Incorporated principles-based approach to collaborative funding (through key principles of accessibility, equity, ethics, participatory approach, quality, and impact)
- Prioritized high-impact domains (such as agriculture, language, health, climate) to help achieve development goals
- Increased access to funding for datasets in low and middle-income contexts
- Increased equitable data usage and supported underserved researchers and data scientists
Key Area of Improvement
- Bolstering communications and support for grantees during the post-award process.
- To Note: The Lacuna Fund Secretariat has already pivoted to address these concerns by establishing a knowledge sharing and communication platform for grantees, sending feedback to all applicants to improve accessibility to TAP decisions, developing strategic communications guidance, and hiring new staff to support the process. See additional recommendations for the Steering Committee, Secretariat, Funders, and Grantees on page 65.
METHODOLOGY:
The evaluation was guided by ten primary evaluation questions (page 19) within the following areas of inquiry: Process, Outcomes, Influence, and Landscape.
Data Innovators used a mixed-methods and utilization-focused evaluation approach. Data collection methods included: desktop review; stakeholder engagements; interviews with grantees and bellwethers; survey to dataset users and grantees; grantee convening session. The full methodology can be viewed on page 21 of the report.
Zindi Webinar (with Lacuna Fund & Masakhane!)
14 December, 5PM GMT
Register here for Zindi’s “Building Parts of Speech Capabilities in African Languages” Webinar! Join Zindi, Masakhane and Lacuna Fund to discuss advances in PoS tagging for Luo and Setswana and meet the winners of the recent Zindi/Masakhane PoS challenge.
- Date: 14 December 2023
- Time: 5 PM GMT
- Host: Paul Kennedy (Zindi)
- Panelists:
- Masakhane – David Adelani
- Lacuna Fund – Jennifer Pratt Miles
- Competition Winners – Shatilov Aleksandr, Iheb Chaabane, Ahmed Attia
