Batista Artimisa Machava owns a small business in Mozambique. But as a low-income gig worker, growing his income is hard.

Batista recently discovered Con-Héctor, a WhatsApp-based virtual assistant dedicated to offering salary insights and free marketing tools to informal workers like him. Con-Héctor helped Batista create a digital CV, an invaluable self-promotional tool he’d never used before. He sent it immediately to a prospective client.

“He evaluated my skills and I [got] a job in Maputo,” he said.

This simple story of real impact on one person—repeated many times over, and in many other forms—may best explain what data science can do for good.

It wouldn’t have been possible without data.org’s $10 million Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge (Challenge), which helped Fundación Capital create Con-Héctor. Con-Héctor has now reached over 28,000 users across nine countries in Africa and Latin America. It is just one of many initiatives that Fundación Capital is able to support because of the challenge.

Organized in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation and the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, the Challenge was conceived with the goal of engaging the world’s best and brightest organizations using data for good.

Data.org’s ambitious goals were matched with even more interest than imagined: not only did organizations across the globe apply, but partner organizations stepped up to answer the call for funding.

The Challenge, announced in 2020, sought breakthrough ideas that “harnessed the power of data to help people and communities thrive.” The team received more than 1,200 applications, which 400 judges reviewed over 2,000 volunteer hours.

Read the full article about equitable data science by Lucia Zhou and Michelle No at Rockefeller Foundation.