Lacuna Fund Datasets for Machine Learning in Underserved Communities

Lacuna Fund is a first-of-its-kind multi-funder collaboration formed in 2020 (and transferred to Global South leadership in July 2025) to fill gaps in data used to train Machine Learning models, making ML and AI more representative, accurate, equitable, and accessible to underserved communities worldwide.

The Fund supports grantees to create high-quality, openly accessible machine-learning datasets that serve urgent problems in Africa, Asia, and Latin America across four thematic areas: agriculture (crop monitoring, smallholder farming, soil and weather datasets); language (low-resource language NLP datasets, including text, speech, and machine translation across 29+ African languages and indigenous Latin American languages); health (clinical AI datasets, disease surveillance, epidemiology); and climate (climate adaptation, weather prediction, ecosystem monitoring).

Following the July 2025 leadership transition, the Fund is now governed by ACTS (African Centre for Technology Studies), CENIA (Chile's National Centre for AI), Masakhane, and the University of Pretoria's Data Science for Social Impact Research Group — putting Global South institutions firmly in control of priorities, calls, and grantmaking decisions.

Calls are issued in cohorts by thematic area; the 2026 cohort emphasizes climate datasets and continued investment in African language NLP.