National Action Plan on Open Government Commitment

– This indicator is achieved. Following the two calls on agriculture and language, 16 projects received funding: 10 for language and six for agriculture. The final funding amount disbursed across all awardees was USD2.1 million. In mid-2023, awardees concluded their projects, with 13 datasets available and openly accessible so far. Agriculture awardees produced training datasets across sub-Saharan Africa to support various agricultural needs. Language awardees produced text and speech datasets for natural language processing technologies in East, West and Southern Africa. Although the initial project is completed, IDRC is still working with Lacuna Fund and the development of new datasets will continue, most likely for years to come. Two requests for proposals were for instance launched (on topics of Climate & Health, Climate & Energy, and Climate & Forests) and the data collection activities are still underway.

The datasets are available here: https://lacunafund.org/datasets/
For an IDRC synthesis article: https://idrc-crdi.ca/en/research-in-action/creating-transformational-impact-lacuna-fund-enables-local-ai-solutions-filling

A call was launched at Lacuna Fund and the selection process is under way - https://lacunafund.org/climate/