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Tuesday 24 September 2024

Meta Announces Winners of 2023 Llama Impact Grants and Innovation Awards for Africa, Middle East, and Turkey


Meta has revealed the recipients of its inaugural Llama Impact Grants and Innovation Awards for 2023. Launched in October, the program aims to fund and support transformative applications of Llama 2 and Llama 3 AI models that tackle critical social challenges. With over 800 entries from organizations across 90 countries, the initiative showcases innovative solutions in education, environmental sustainability, and technological advancement.

Llama Impact Grants
Among the top recipients, Digital Green, in collaboration with One Acre Fund, has been awarded $500,000 USD. Runner-up Jacaranda Health will receive $300,000 USD for its initiative. Highlights of the projects include:

Supporting Farmers in Rural Communities: Digital Green’s "Farmer Chat" project will use a multilingual AI chatbot, powered by Llama, to deliver tailored agricultural advice to small-scale farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. The chatbot, trained on an extensive agricultural database, will provide timely and practical responses in languages such as Hindi, Swahili, and Kikuyu, addressing region-specific farming needs.

Enhancing Maternal Health
Jacaranda Health’s "PROMPTS" tool, a digital health platform offering SMS-based guidance and an AI-driven clinical helpdesk, will be expanded. Aimed at supporting expectant and new mothers across Kenya, Ghana, and Eswatini, the tool will help users access critical maternal and newborn healthcare in a timely, personalized manner. The long-term goal is to establish PROMPTS as a leading resource for maternal health support throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.
Llama Impact Innovation Awards

In addition to the Llama Impact Grants, Meta also announced the recipients of the Llama Impact Innovation Awards. Award winners will receive up to $35,000 USD, including mentorship, partnership opportunities and ad credits, to further their innovative work with Llama. The award recipients include:

HelpMum, which has developed an innovative chatbot service that delivers accurate and timely information on vaccination and immunisation. Leveraging Llama 3’s advanced language processing capabilities, HelpMum created Vax-Llamamodel—an AI-driven, open-source model designed to provide reliable vaccination information. This open-source model can be integrated into HelpMum’s chatbot service and adopted/used by healthcare organisations worldwide.

Tanzania AI Community’s chatbot Twiga which provides teachers with a virtual assistant for generating exams, lesson notes and course materials tailored to the Tanzanian curriculum via WhatsApp. Twiga uses Llama 3 to generate contextualised educational content to address the shortage of quality resources and the high workload of teachers in Tanzania. It uses Llama 3 70B in its RAG pipeline to generate high-quality educational exercises and Llama 3 7B for smaller tasks like efficient query pre-processing and data extraction.

Flow Informatics’ phosoAI project aims to address food insecurity in Malawi by enhancing a WhatsApp-based chatbot that provides people with real-time information on food prices, availability, and agricultural practices, particularly in rural and urban areas. The chatbot uses Llama 3 to provide real-time information to users in Chichewa. It also allows for voice commands to improve accessibility in low-literacy areas.

Meta is deeply committed to open-source AI and believes that expanding access will drive meaningful global progress. Applications for the Llama 3.1 Impact Grants are now open until November 22, 2024.

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