Meet five organisations using AI for social good

AsyLex, a Swiss NGO, is dedicated to providing free legal counseling and representation to refugees in Switzerland, ensuring fair access to the asylum process. Through a collaboration with TTTR and the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, AsyLex is exploring the potential of AI to streamline asylum appeal document generation, enabling them to serve more asylum seekers in need. The NGO is developing a tool aimed at improving the efficiency of handling asylum cases by generating properly formatted asylum appeal documents, using required UN templates. While still in development, this initiative holds the promise of leveraging AI to scale operations and serve more asylum seekers in need.

Photo by Asylex

Animal Ethics (AE), a U.S.-based NGO, advocates for animal welfare. They focus mainly on wild animals, that are often overlooked. To make reliable information on animal welfare more accessible to the general public and help combat common biases about wild animals, AE has partnered with Freeport Metrics to develop an AI chatbot assistant built on AWS using Anthropic’s Claude. This chatbot, which uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and advanced prompt engineering techniques, provides accurate and unbiased information about animals, animal ethics, and the issue of wild animal suffering. By harnessing the capabilities of AI, AE aims to fight misconceptions that lead to the neglect of animal welfare concerns, promote informed and impartial discussions, and drive positive change in attitudes and actions towards animal welfare. With over 4.4 million page views annually and materials available in 11 languages, the AI assistant helps AE reach a wider audience, raise awareness about the importance of considering the well-being of all animals - including those in the wild - and challenges biased perspectives that downplay or ignore animal suffering.

Photo by Animal Ethics

Zero Emissions World (ZEW), a Portugal-based NGO is implementing an innovative gamified model that will present social and environmental projects as engaging 'missions' for its global community. Through this approach, ZEW seeks to foster a social impact network that enables everyone to not only observe but also actively participate in positive change worldwide. By leveraging AWS, ZEW has achieved an estimated 40% reduction in infrastructure costs compared to on-premises setups, as well as up to 88% lower carbon emissions. This cloud-based strategy facilitates donations for environmental and social initiatives, while fostering sustained donor engagement through gamification elements. Additionally, ZEW is preparing to utilise AI capabilities to analyse donor data and provide personalised mission recommendations aligned with individual motivations and preferences.

Photo by Zero Emissions World

Afri-SET is on a mission to ensure affordable air quality sensors are accessible in West Africa. Through the development of a smart database capable of handling data from various sensors, regardless of their manufacturer, Afri-SET is democratising access to critical air quality information. With the help of generative AI-powered data processing solutions, such as "Bedrock Mining the Air for Data Nuggets”, developed by Amazon volunteers during the Air Quality hackathon, the process of handling raw sensor data has been streamlined. The solution uses Anthropic’s Claude 2.1 foundation model through Amazon Bedrock to generate Python codes, which convert input data into a unified data format. Thanks to AI-powered analytics the tool identifies pollution hotspots, paving the way for scalable and impactful air quality monitoring across Africa.

Photo by AfriSET

sensors.Africa, an initiative incubated by Code for Africa, is addressing the challenge of data gaps in air quality monitoring across the continent by leveraging AI to predict missing data points. To address data gaps resulting from device downtime caused by factors like power outages and weak connectivity, the project employs a machine learning tool built on Sagemaker Canvas. This solution is ensuring the reliability and completeness of air quality datasets. With that data, sensors.Africa empowers scientists, researchers, policymakers, and citizens to make informed decisions and drive positive change in their communities.

Photo by sensors.Africa