Columbia World Projects (CWP) and the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) announced the formalization of a partnership on July 13th. The organizations will join together and will work with partners in Africa to increase access to energy, unlocking economic opportunity across the continent.

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger and Judith Karl, the Executive Secretary of UNCDF, signed a formal memorandum of understanding confirming the partnership ahead of an online kickoff event. 

The partnership will support CWP’s Using Data to Catalyze Energy Investments project, which launched in 2019. The project aims to expand energy access in Uganda by collecting and analyzing data about where energy is available. The data will be used to help the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) and other partners invest in entrepreneurs, innovators and other entities to expand energy access to new areas and communities in a sustainable way. The data will also be made available to private and public investors to help them develop strategies to offer affordable clean energy to populations in need of reliable access.

“As we work to ensure that no Ugandan is left behind in the digital era, it is important that we harness different types of data and analytics to identify the right opportunities for investment in clean energy solutions; these opportunities will need new field data at scale and novel means to gather, evaluate and share that data,” Chris Lukolyo the Uganda Digital Country Lead at UNCDF, said: “Our partnership with Columbia World Projects positions us to collect and analyze various types of digital data and to build the local expertise to achieve this goal sustainably.”

"Through this partnership and similar collaborations, we are taking research and scholarship out into the world and learning from partners how to further enrich the scholarship that we do at the university,” Nicholas Lemann, the director of CWP, said.

As part of the project, Columbia researchers will develop and deploy new techniques for mapping energy demand, using the latest data gathering methods. Data will be stored on a Columbia University open-source data platform which will provide the capability to compute and analyze data. A dashboard will be designed for practitioners and policy makers to share actionable information. The analyses will support a productive, sustainable and growing energy market.