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Nonprofits are building creative solutions in Microsoft AI to address some of the world’s most entrenched challenges. This evolving technology is helping unlock social impact organizations’ capacity to do good at scale, securely.
Armed conflict, economic uncertainty, climate change, and countless other pressures contribute to global headwinds gusting against progress. Thousands of nonprofits and other social impact organizations are bringing the skills, passion, and boots-on-the-ground effort to meet these challenges directly. Their dedication improves the lives of people across the world.
Mission-driven organizations face difficulties of their own, though. Changes in demographics, global economies, and geopolitics lead to rising demand for their services. Nonprofits have always operated with limited resources, but today’s economic climate makes fundraising even tougher. Increasingly sophisticated threats to democracy and cybersecurity make their work more needed and more difficult at the same time.
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Read more storiesThis is where AI can help—to enable nonprofits and other social impact organizations to do more good with less. AI, through Microsoft’s purpose-driven technology, can unlock the capacity of these vital organizations worldwide. As the sector increasingly adopts AI, we see more examples of its potential to accelerate societal impact.
We are supporting nonprofits through technology, and particularly by leveraging Azure AI, to deepen their impact in three significant ways. AI is helping them protect and expand critical services, meet the needs of shifting demographics in the Global South, and partner across sectors to drive humanitarian progress.
1. Securing and expanding critical services
With roughly 8 billion people sharing the earth’s limited resources, and with too many people living on not enough, it’s important to steward critical supplies and services. From healthcare to clean water, these resources are foundational to well-being and the pursuit of fundamental rights.
AI is enabling social impact organizations to reliably and securely scale these essential services. For example, while the Kenyan Red Cross offers mental health support in person and through its 24-hour phone line, this vital care remains out of reach for many people. The Kenyan Red Cross worked with psychologists and counselors, AI experts, people with lived experience of mental health conditions, and others to create an Azure AI-powered chatbot to expand its free mental health outreach.
The chatbot, which is in its beta release and is embedded in the organization’s website, prompts conversations about mental wellbeing, recommends helpful practices, and offers to connect users to human counselors and in-person resources such as humanitarian organizations or clinics. Kelvin Njenga, Digital Transformation Officer at Kenya Red Cross, adds, “In Kenya, there is a lot of stigma around getting mental health support. Leveraging AI in the chatbot provides that support, confidentially.”
This use of AI does not attempt to replace human connection. Rather, it complements person-to-person support and broadens the Kenyan Red Cross’s capacity to reach even more people with the mental health care they deserve. About one billion people worldwide live with a medical condition, and technology-enabled solutions like this chatbot can help overcome barriers to crucial services.1
2. Delivering benefits for the most vulnerable and hard to reach people
AI is enabling organizations to reach more people in some of the most remote areas of the world. Through better use of data and insights, AI solutions can lead to more informed decision-making and more efficient development programs that can change lives.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized agency of the United Nations and an International Financial Institution that invests in the world’s poorest people, has built an internal analytics platform with Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Azure—including Azure OpenAI Service and Azure Machine Learning—and other data and AI solutions to turn its information into insights and then action.
IFAD developed the platform in compliance with the United Nations Principles on the Ethical Use of AI. The solution combines data, dashboards, and visualizations from diverse sources across IFAD, enabling staff around the world to connect and contribute to this wealth of information. IFAD anticipates the AI-enabled platform will help them develop and implement ever-more impactful interventions which benefit small-scale food producers and other rural people.
AI and machine learning can combine and analyze vast amounts of information at a pace and scale impossible for humans to achieve on their own. Empowered by the most complete information possible, leaders of social impact organizations can move the needle farther on the world’s most pressing challenges.
3. Partnering to empower the social impact ecosystem
The problems our planet faces are too vast and complex for any one organization to solve. We must all work together to innovate solutions that make life better for everyone. By utilizing the expertise and lived experience of a diversity of stakeholders, AI solutions can make more of a difference than any single organization or agency could do alone.
That is precisely the approach that one coalition is taking to tackle malnutrition in Kenya. A cross-sector collaboration between Amref Health Africa, the Kenyan Ministry of Health, the University of Southern California, and Microsoft is developing a model in Azure to predict and prevent malnutrition.
The model combines a decade’s worth of detailed healthcare information, collected by the Kenyan Ministry of Health, with other inputs, such as satellite imagery and weather data. Machine learning-powered modeling will help Amref, Kenyan health agencies, and partner humanitarian organizations better understand current nutrition within communities and anticipate future problems. This forecasting will enable them to mobilize health workers and deploy resources to halt malnutrition, explains Dr. Shiphrah Kuria, Amref Regional Manager for Reproductive, Maternal, and Child Health.
“This technology puts us ahead because with better planning and better prevention, we are getting closer to our goals of ending malnutrition.”
Dr. Shiphrah Kuria, Amref Regional Manager for Reproductive, Maternal, and Child Health
We at Microsoft are not only providing the technology that enables nonprofits to build and utilize these Azure AI-based solutions. We are also investing deeply in the infrastructure and resources needed to run AI at an unprecedented scale. That way, we help bring the power of AI to social impact organizations everywhere—and transform the world for the better.
Explore AI solutions for nonprofits
Learn more about how Microsoft is supporting nonprofits, see how other organizations are using AI to drive impact, and get more information about how you can safely and securely deploy AI to support your business needs.
