The Rockefeller Foundation announced a $5.5M initiative that will use our eyes in space— EO satellites—to track the effects of climate change in sub-Saharan Africa.
The project: The Electricity Growth and Use in Developing Economies (e-GUIDE) Initiative and Atlas AI, a company that aims to help maximize the impact of infrastructure changes, are collaborating on the project with the Rockefeller Foundation. They plan to leverage this collaboration to help make vulnerable regions in sub-Saharan Africa more climate resilient and spur economic growth.
- To start, the project will focus on areas of Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Uganda.
- The companies also partnered with the Kigali Collaborative Research Center (KCRC), a Rwandan research hub.
“We want to develop tools to measure how infrastructural developments such as roads, electricity systems, and agriculture lead to economic development,” said Jay Taneja, principal investigator on the project, in a press release. “We want to understand which combinations result in the most extensive and fastest economic development, primarily in countries in sub-Saharan Africa.”
Bang for your buck: The initiative aims to produce a digital data platform that can provide policy recommendations on climate change mitigation measures that will yield the most positive change for the smallest investment.
