Payal Dalal, Executive Vice President of Global Programs at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, and Deval Sanghavi, Co-founder and Partner at Dasra, speak with Aleks Berditchevskaia, Principal Researcher, Nesta Centre for Collective Intelligence Design, about the Center’s Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Inclusion Challenge, a global call for AI solutions to accelerate inclusion and economic empowerment. Dasra is a funding partner of the AI Challenge, and Dasra’s other co-founder, Neera Nundy, participated as a judge for the Challenge. Done in partnership with data.org, the winners were announced in December 2024: https://newsroom.mastercard.com/news/press/2024/december/mastercard-center-for-inclusive-growth-and-data-org-announce-ai2ai-challenge-awardees/

In this Humanitarian AI Today podcast episode, guest hosted by Aleks Berditchevskaia, Payal and Deval speak in depth about the challenge, this year’s five winners, and share their takeaways and learnings from the challenge and global submission process. Payal and Deval emphasize the importance of bringing partners together to organize and support these kinds of challenges and accelerators, which help source innovations and advance participatory approaches to technology development. They highlight the speed at which the technology sector is advancing and offer advice on keeping pace with, and adapting to, challenges and opportunities that are emerging.

More about the Center’s work and its upcoming Global Inclusive Growth Summit, taking place on April 24th in Washington D.C., can be found here: https://globalinclusivegrowthsummit.com/