The AI for Equity Challenge: Climate Action, Gender, and Health aims to support organisations applying artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to drive progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 3, 5, and 13 - Climate Action, Gender Equality, and Good Health and Well-Being, respectively.

Climate change exacerbates existing inequalities and threatens hard-won gains in areas like maternal and child health (SDG 3) as well as gender equity (SDG 5), disproportionately impacting vulnerable populations, and especially in the Global South. This challenge is focused on empowering organisations to develop AI-powered solutions that address pressing challenges at the intersection of climate action, gender and health equity. Through this challenge, we aim to harness the transformative potential of artificial intelligence to create a more sustainable, equitable, and just world.

This is a two-part challenge organised through a collaboration between the International Research Centre in Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI), an organisation under the auspices of UNESCO;  Zindi; and Amazon Web Services (AWS), bringing advanced cloud technology and data made available through the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI). Prizes, AI solutions, and support to the value of $275,000 are available for the winners of these challenges.

Congratulations to Round One winners!

How to Participate

Do you want to help implement two incredible projects putting AI to good use in combating challenges of climate action, gender, and health equity? Now is your chance! Sign up to help Sokoine University of Agriculture predict waterborne disease outbreaks in Tanzania, and to help Kuyesera AI predict the extent of flooding damage in Malawi. We're even giving the top participants additional resources through our partnership with AWS. Don't miss out!

Prizes and Awards

$25,000 cash prizes

$200,000 in AWS credit and technical support

Crowd-sourced custom AI solutions worth $50,000

Round One

The two winning proposals from Round One will be selected as the problem statements for Round Two. Each winning proposal will receive:

• 3x winning AI models (outputs of Round Two challenges on Zindi)
• $25,000 in AWS credits to develop and deploy potential solutions
• Pairing with a team of technical mentors and domain expert researchers from AWS and IRCAI to help develop and deploy solutions

In addition, AWS will award a discretionary $2,500 in AWS credits to each of three runners' up, and $1,000 in AWS credits to up to 10 additional runner-ups from Round One.

Round Two

The winners of each of the two final challenges on Zindi will receive:

The top 100 teams in each challenge on 6 January 2025 will receive AWS cloud credit support to the value of $500.

About the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI)

The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) is a tech-for-good program that is helping researchers, scientists, and innovators around the world advance their work on sustainability-related research, including climate change. The program provides publicly-available access to important scientific data on AWS that can be otherwise hard for researchers to access or analyse.

For full challenge Rules, Terms and Conditions, please visit this page.

For FAQs, please visit this page.