AI FOR EQUITY CHALLENGE

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.

In the first round of the challenge (23 September – 4 November 2024), we invite organisations to submit proposals detailing how they will use ASDI as well as their own datasets to build AI and advanced cloud-based solutions to pressing challenges they are well-positioned to tackle. Winners of the first round will be announced on 2 December 2024 at AWS re:Invent 2024.

Two winning proposals from the first round will enter the second round of the challenge (2 December 2024 – 31 January 2025). In this round, the proposed problems and datasets will be the basis for two AI challenges designed in collaboration with and hosted on Zindi, where thousands of data practitioners from all around the world will compete to build the most successful AI solution for each of the two finalists. Winners of the second round will be announced on 12 February 2025.

Winning solutions from the Round Two challenges will belong entirely to the organisations that submitted the winning proposals in Round One, who will also each win $25,000 in cloud compute as well as technical support from AWS and IRCAI to implement their winning solutions.

$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 first 200 teams to sign up for the Round Two challenges will receive AWS cloud credit support to the value of $500.

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.