Feature article on Lab’s collaboration with Togo
Togo and UC Berkeley: A data science alliance to build a dynamic West African nation Forged in the crisis of COVID, a relationship between the small but innovative country and the Center for Effective Global Action has blossomed into a... Read More →
Best paper at CVPR EarthVision 2025
GOL fellow Ando Shah’s paper on foundation models for earth observation that can work with data from any satellite, wins best paper at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) EarthVision (June 2025).
Google.org invests in GOL
GOL is proud to participate in Google.org’s AI Collaborative on Food Security
Lab funded by Jameel Observatory
The Jameel Observatory has generously provided support for the Lab’s research on “Improved Early Warning of Food Insecurity”, led by PhD student Susana Constenla-Villoslada.
Public launch of interactive poverty maps
GOL has publicly released extremely high-resolution poverty maps, available for free at https://www.povertymaps.net/
Lab’s research featured in Nature
Research by GOL was featured in the Nature article, “Can AI help beat poverty? Researchers test ways to aid the poorest people.” The article describes the lab’s work with the Government of Togo, and provides some perspective the role of... Read More →
FastCompany on lab’s research: These new poverty maps could reshape how we deliver international aid
These new poverty maps could reshape how we deliver international aid Granular geographic targeting, down to 2-by-2-kilometer squares, may help pinpoint the very poorest who need urgent financial assistance—and COVID-19 vaccines. “…The new model—called the Relative Wealth Index—will be freely available... Read More →
PhD student Emily Aiken and Prof. Blumenstock quoted in Economist article, “In poor countries, statistics are both undersupplied and underused”
“Emily Aiken of the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues have tested whether a machine-learning algorithm can identify the poorest households in 80 Afghan villages based on mobile-phone data, such as the duration of their calls, their network of... Read More →
BBC News covers lab research in 5-minute film, “How satellite images are helping one country hand out cash”
How satellite images are helping one country hand out cash Togo has found a high-tech way to identify people who need financial help in the pandemic and send them emergency cash. They use computers to search for clues in... Read More →
NPR article on our work in Togo
Read about our work on NPR: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/02/15/966848542/the-pandemic-pushed-this-farmer-into-deep-poverty-then-something-amazing-happene Shegun Adjadi Bakari, advisor to Togo’s president, consulted with Esther Duflo, who in 2019 won a Nobel prize for her experimental approach to alleviating poverty — using randomized control trials to see if programs... Read More →