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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.
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Or search similar grants →According to the current listing, eligibility includes: Open to researchers, civil society organizations, academic institutions, government bodies, and tech-for-good entities based in or working in partnership with Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Strong preference for teams led by or substantively involving researchers from the regions being studied. All resulting datasets must be openly licensed and widely accessible. Multi-disciplinary teams combining domain expertise (e.g., agronomists, public health practitioners, linguists) with ML/data science expertise prioritized. Confirm the full requirements in the official notice before applying.
The current listing shows individual grant awards typically $100,000 to $300,000 USD per project, with cohort-level investments of $1M+ across thematic focus areas. Lacuna Fund has invested over $10 million since 2020 enabling creation of 75+ new ML datasets across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Verify award ceilings, matching requirements, and allowable costs in the official notice.
Lacuna Fund Datasets for Machine Learning in Underserved Communities is funded by Lacuna Fund (multi-funder collaboration: Google.org, Rockefeller Foundation, IDRC, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; managed by ACTS, CENIA, Masakhane, and University of Pretoria DSI). Verify program details on the funder's official page before applying.
Start from the official opportunity page linked in this listing — it carries the sponsor's submission instructions.
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