Lacuna Fund provides data scientists, researchers, and social entrepreneurs with the resources they need to either produce new labeled datasets to address an underserved population or problem, augment existing datasets to be more representative, or update old datasets to be more sustainable. All datasets produced will be locally developed and owned, and they will be openly accessible to the international community while adhering to best practices regarding ethics and privacy.

Aim

The Lacuna Fund aims to make its funding accessible to as many organizations as possible in the AI for social good space and cultivate capacity and emerging organizations in the field.

Focus Areas

• Agriculture: Enabling new and more robust AI applications through remote sensing and other critical datasets.
• Language: Translation, speech recognition, and other datasets to enable the promise of digital communication for all.
• Health: Improving the robustness and availability of AI solutions in healthcare through datasets across the value chain.

Eligibilities

To be eligible for funding, organizations must:

• Be either a non-profit entity, research institution, for-profit social enterprise, or a team of such organizations. Individuals must apply through an institutional sponsor. Partnerships are welcome but only the lead applicant will receive funds.
• Have a mission supporting societal good, broadly defined.
• Have all necessary national or other approvals to conduct the proposed research. The approval process may be conducted in parallel with the grant application, if necessary.
• Approval costs, if any, are the responsibility of the applicant.
• Have the technical capacity to conduct dataset labeling, creation, expansion, and/or maintenance.
• Be sufficiently stable to ensure the sustainability of the dataset or have arrangements with an organization of sufficient stability.

Application 

Applications for open RFPs are only accepted through the applicant portal. The portal requires you to create an account to access and manage your application. More information on how to create an account and access the portal can be found on SurveyMonkey Apply’s website. 

 Please see the Q&A here

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