African Centre for Technology Studies: Lacuna Fund: Machine Learning Datasets for More Equitable Health Outcomes

Gaps in training and evaluation datasets for machine learning and AI can result in inaccuracy or bias in health models and applications. Meridian Institute, serving as secretariat for Lacuna Fund, will use a grant for core funding to: \- Support meetings of the Lacuna Fund steering committee; \- Provide an honorarium for Technical Advisory Panel members; \- Engage a data quality expert to review and provide suggestions to ensure quality of funded datasets; \- Partner with machine learning experts to provide capacity building workshops for grantees; \- Provide technical and financial support to grantees to move from datasets to use cases; \- Convene grantees to build capacity, exchange lessons learned, and support awareness, sharing, and re-use of datasets; and, \- Evaluate Lacuna Fund processes and track dataset uptake and utilization. Through a related contract, Meridian will also select and train a partner to manage a call for proposals for data scientists and researchers in low- and middle-income countries to create new health datasets or unlock, aggregate, or expand existing datasets to begin to fill the gaps in health data and make machine learning and AI tools more representative, accessible, and equitable.

Programme: Discretionary Award

Source: The Wellcome Trust, 360Giving data via the 360Giving API, published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Read from https://api.threesixtygiving.org/api/v1/org/GB-CHC-210183/grants_made/?limit=1000&offset=24000. Reshaped by All Business Africa into this record; amounts and currency are as the funder states them.