Village Data Analytics (VIDA)

Tobias Engelmeier is founder of Village Data Analytics (www.villagedata.io), an innovative AI-technology that provides actionable data intelligence for rural villages. His mission is to make planning, investments and impact measurement in developing countries data-driven – and uplift marginalized populations at scale. 

He believes in the power of knowledge to solve the world’s complex problems and has always worked at the intersection of poverty reduction, climate change and data. His approach to change is entrepreneurship. Tobias has founded three insight-driven companies. Bridge To India, the leading market enabler and research provider for the solar industry in India (www.bridgetoindia.com) helped shape the country’s National Solar Mission. India Solar Rooftop, a project development company, pioneered solar-as-a-service for industrial users in India. TFE Energy (www.tfe.energy), builds data standards, KPIs and results-based financing schemes for energy access. Tobias also helped initiate the Grameen Creative Lab (www.grameencreativelab.com).

Our global development efforts are not good enough. Especially in remote villages, too many people still live in poverty and without access to proper electricity, sanitation, healthcare and education. A key reason is that, in these frontier markets, we work in the dark. Making investment decisions and measuring impact is difficult when critical information is incomplete, absent or outdated. As a result, billions are wasted at a terrible cost to the people.

VIDA addresses this critical gap placing actionable data at the fingertips of governments, development Institutions, investors and businesses. It does so by leveraging the enormous advances in data gathering and processing technologies – from data cleaning to satellites to machine learning. Today, VIDA already accelerates electrification and healthcare access in Africa.

We elevate humanity by giving expression to the needs of people living in remote, underserved villages and thereby accelerating their access to development.

Policy makers and businesses struggle to plan investments, monitor progress and measure impact in rural development because they lack reliable data about villages. While we have anecdotal knowledge about individual villages, at scale, we lack even basic information such as: Where are villages and how many people live there? Do they have access to the grid, to schools or health-centres? What is their economy and agriculture like?

Take the example of electrification, the field where VIDA launched. Access to modern energy is a fundamental condition for development, impacting health, education and incomes. 2 billion people still live without access to reliable power. 70% of them are best electrified through off-grid solutions, requiring over $400 billion in investment. But with the current, manual approaches we are stuck, we can’t scale. We simply can’t survey 2 billion people living in remote areas to make the best planning and investment decisions. As a result, on the current trajectory, 800 million people will remain unelectrified even in 2030.

VIDA addresses this structural problem by combining both high-impact technology and deep, on-ground expertise in frontier villages. We leverage the rapid advances in data gathering and processing technologies – from satellites to algorithms.

VIDA can be quickly customised to user requirements and data ecosystems. In our launch product, we use our grassroots knowledge to model energy access proxies that determine a village’s suitability for off-grid electrification. This is done in five steps:

1. Identify villages:  AI algorithms identify off-grid villages based on satellite imagery (this can be at the scale of countries)

2. Extract village characteristics:  For every identified village, VIDA automatically extracts village characteristics, in categories such as, demographics, road and grid access, water and vegetation

3. Predict: VIDA uses AI algorithms based on satellites and on-ground training data to predict socio-economic health and energy demand at village-level

4. Rank: Based on the extracted characteristics, on proprietary energy models, and on user requirements, VIDA scores and ranks the villages

5. Display: Results are displayed as a decision-making tool in an interactive, smart map-based UI

For more, see www.villagedata.io 

VIDA serves the people in need of development investment by making their needs transparent to planners and investors. Our insights into remote villages are already leveraged in different ways.

·       In Nigeria and Tanzania, we help mini-grid companies understand, which villages could run productive use appliances (such as agricultural machinery) and have anchor loads (such as schools). That helps them determine potential energy demand and develop village income streams. It improves site selection and system sizing, which ensures that energy is available at the lowest possible cost.

·       In Kenya and the DRC, we help solar home system companies target sales efforts in villages that can afford their product. This reduces operational costs and addresses default risk, improving their ability to grow and reach more customers.

·       In Ethiopia and Kenya, governments and DFI's use VIDA for electrification planning. They need to understand what the most effective way of electrifying off-grid populations is in terms of cost, time and level of service.

·       In the context of the COVID response, VIDA helps determine which rural health centers should be electrified first, based on the population they serve, their strategic importance and the electrification potential in the surrounding village.

We empower planners and businesses who uplift the lives of 2 billion people by making rural development investments more effective and helping transform a sector that has been too unsuccessful for too long. VIDA is already used to accelerate electrification and rural healthcare. 

In Ethiopia, for example, we identified and characterised 2,500 off-grid villages, with a combined population of 3 million, in support of the government’s electrification effort. In West Africa, we identified and evaluated for investment around 1,100 rural health facilities, serving a population of more than 20 million.

We have been working on electrification for many years and the lack of information about rural villages has always been a major obstacle. Three years ago, we conducted searches for hundreds of potential mini-grid sites in Kenya, Papua New Guinea and Myanmar, using the traditional, bottom-up approach of site surveys. The experience showed us once more just how expensive, time-consuming and highly error prone this process is. It was clear to us that to achieve development goals we need to find a better way. Since then we started to explore different data sources and technologies.

When, in 2018, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched an innovation call to use earth observation to improve electrification, we took part and won it. It was our launchpad for VIDA. 

In the following year, through product tests with mini-grid developers, investors and government planners, we learned that we need to combine earth observation data with on-ground data (surveys, telecoms data, data from operating sites, etc) to give our analysis the required depth and texture. Through our partnership with appliedAI we were able to add sophisticated data analysis based on machine learning to identify patterns and predict socio-economic factors.

I feel, at a very personal level, that poverty is a challenge for my generation to solve, and that solving it is of existential importance, irrespective of where we live. Having (three) children, reinforces that belief. This sense of urgency is paired with a great curiosity and passion for learning about life in the countries where I work. I am attracted to the diversity of human cultures and feel a sense of community across them. I am also optimistic. I believe that we can solve poverty through our ability to innovate, improve and cooperate.

Sometimes, the enormity of the tasks before us and setbacks (my own and those in the world around me) make me pause. However, whenever I visit the villages where we work and I meet the people there, I regain strength and hope and purpose.

I enjoy the freedom that comes through my entrepreneurial approach and think it can best provide the much-needed innovation in the development sector. With data technology, I have a more ambivalent relationship. It is changing our world, no matter what – so we should harness its power for good, while keeping a close watch on unintended consequences.

As a team, we bring together a unique combination of deep grassroots expertise in the developing markets we serve and access to cutting-edge data technology. We can constantly apply and test technology solutions in the field. 

The VIDA team consists of electrical engineers who are electrification experts. Members come from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Several have built mini-grids in remote areas themselves. The team also has expertise in software development, earth observation, data-analytics and modelling. Our partnership with Germany's leading lab for artificial intelligence, appliedAI (www.appliedAI.de), gives us access to a team of excellent data scientists, to advanced computing hardware and to the expertise of appliedAI's partners, including Google, IBM and Microsoft.

We are also supported by the European Space Agency, which gives us access to state-of-the-art know-how in earth observation and the use of satellite data-sets. Our expertise in this field is further strengthened by our participation in the Copernicus (accelerator.copernicus.eu) and PARSEC (parsec-accelerator.eu) accelerator programs, that offer specialised enterprise growth to EO companies. My own expertise is in building impact companies, in understanding development (frontier) markets, in building teams and in raising investment.

The most fundamental challenge for VIDA is that it operates in a market with low purchasing power. Electrification companies, for example, typically have very slim margins. While we set out to improve their economics so that they can scale to do justice to the size of the energy access challenge, as of today, they struggle.

Our solution is to cooperate to bring more investment into the sector. We do this in two ways. Firstly, we form partnerships with leading electrification companies. We work free-of-cost in return for site-level data and on-ground validation of our predictions. That gives us a chance to improve our technology and gives us credibility with other customer groups, namely development organizations and energy access investors. This has been successful. Secondly, we cooperate with the electrification companies to improve village-level subsidy setting, at scale. Another approach we are pursuing is to inverse the entire economic pyramid. Instead of working with companies that sell something (electricity) to poor customers, we want to work with companies that generate income for these people. Using VIDA, we can validate ecosystem services, such as planting trees, that are performed by villagers for large CO2 emitters in the developed world.

I have introduced new and potentially game changing technology into the energy access industry, after years of experience working in the field. The key to achieving that is in bringing together very different, complimentary teams to build transformative solutions for markets we deeply care about. In the case of VIDA, this is the on-ground development know-how of TFE Energy, with earth observation, and the AI knowledge of appliedAI. In my past role as founder of Bridge To India (www.bridgetoindia.com), I brought together an equally diverse team to build a company over a period of seven years to accelerates the uptake of renewables and energy access in India.

In my teams, I firmly believe in empowering people through trust and freedom and in developing talent and growth. Just yesterday, a former employee wrote to me in a note of thanks that he observed me “how I lead teams with total openness to ideas and yet being firm and decisive, the youthful brimming energy when you walked into office and sometimes the much more somber attitude of someone who is getting the job done. You managed to capture this wide palette of abilities and yet stay humble and centred throughout.”

VIDA is highly innovative in the way it combines data-technologies for decision-making in the rural development context.

In Peter Drucker's terminology, our innovation is "new knowledge". I am aware that this is a challenging approach to innovation: it requires a change in the way the development sector is working. We can show how our solution fits into and improves existing processes today, but ultimately it will be most beneficial, when processes are changed fundamentally. 

The timing of our innovation seems to be good. We can now bring together different aspects of technological change that each, in their own right, have reached a high level of maturity. We can, thus "stand on the shoulders of giants" or, perhaps more aptly: of a pyramid of solutions. The cost competitiveness and the capabilities of satellites for earth observation is growing at very high rate as "new space" takes shape as an industry. At the same time, the cost for storing, transmitting and analyzing large amounts of data are falling rapidly. And ever more open source algorithms are made available in our niche of development planning. Our main success factor is a deep understanding of these technology trends and our ability to embed them into our own modeling, to put them to use for our customer group: the electrification industry.

The timing is also opportune on the market side, where distributed electrification options are just now ready to take off at a significant scale. 

We want to make data-based decisions and impact measurement in development so easily and cheaply available that it becomes standard practice. To achieve this, we need to further improve Village Data Analytics. 

In April 2020, we embarked on an 18-months product plan ("VIDA 2.0") - supported by our partners appliedAI and the European Space Agency. It will:

●      Increase the level of automation of analysis to further reduce cost and increase the speed at which we can deliver analyses. 

●      Deepen of our analysis to include new data sources and predictions. A key area is strengthening the correlation between infrastructure/agriculture and socio-economic factors, such as asset ownership, energy demand and ability to pay, on the other (using ML).

●      Further improve the predictive accuracy of our analysis (this includes an ongoing validation through partnerships with electrification companies in Africa).

●      Identify and address biases (e.g. with respect to gender, age, village size) to ensure that people benefit equally from our analysis.

●      Shift from a technology-based service model to a technology subscription product.

In three to five years, we want to expand our electrification analysis to offer data-based analytics for the broader remote village economy. In a first step, that will include water infrastructure (and electric pumping) and agricultural value chains (and electric machinery), including climate change resilience. In a second step, that will include infrastructure investments in healthcare, education, internet and roads.

We have three main partners:

1. The European Space Agency (ESA): ESA has invested in us and supports us with know-how in earth observation, with access to data and resources, as well as with business development support.
2. AppliedAI (www.appliedAI.de): AppliedAI is our main partner, they help us build the AI backbone of the VIDA technology, train-up our own employees, help us identify AI talent and give us business development support (they in-turn have partnerships with organizations such as UNICEF, WFP, IBM and Google). We have an agreement with appliedAI, whereby they co-invest into the product development in return for a profit share over five years.
3. Implementation partners: We work with local partners to validate our predictions, improve our data-base and analyses, and develop marketable case studies. They have the potential to grow into customer relationships and we can jointly attract innovation funding. Our main partners are four leading electrification companies working across several African countries. In addition, we work with new partners whenever we access a new market segment (such as health or agriculture).

Our business model is "Pay-Per-Village".

It has two pricing structures:

The first is a “project fee”: We are paid per village analyzed.

The second is a “yearly subscription fee”: We get paid to monitor villages on an ongoing basis. During this process, we continuously update village data (from surveys, earth observation and smart meters). This helps our customers assess village progress and improves our predictions.

Our analysis is displayed on our own platform, to which customers get a login.

We have just raised funding for our ongoing product development over the next 18 months. In addition, we earn revenue from VIDA customers.

The Elevate Prize would help us with

1. Access to networks and communication support on our journey to explain to decision-makers how data-based planning can change development for the better, make investments more effective and measure impact.
2. Access to partners with deep knowledge of development sectors we want to expand into, including healthcare infrastructure, cooling chains, water and agriculture.
3. Access to global talent (especially data scientists) to continue to build our team through e.g. the MIT community.
4. Initiating purposeful conversations with potential investors that have a high degree of fit with our impact mission and technology approach.
5. Financial leeway to build out our new VIDA vs. COVID technology in a strategic manner.

1. Funding and revenue model: We will seek a new funding round in the next 12 months.
2. Talent recruitment: We want to diversify our team with talent from Africa and female talent. 
3. Board members and advisors: We are in the process of building a board that reflects our vision, or markets and the technologies we use.
4. Legal and regulatory matters: We need to detail our IP/open source strategy. We also welcome support on potential data biases.
5. Marketing and media exposure: We have successful case studies and now need to spread the word about them. 

We would like to partner with

1. Healthcare organisations, operating in developing countries (such as Ada Health, E-Heza, LifeBank) to link – anonymised, aggregated – health data e.g. on epidemics such as Cholera, Malaria, Measles, COVID19 to our health infrastructure planning (travel times, capacity, vaccination availability).
2. Cold-storage or agro-processing organisations operating in developing countries (such as ColdHubs) to include productive use of electricity opportunities into our electrification planning.
3. Ecosystem service organisations operating in developing countries (such as Inga Alley Cropping) with whom we can pilot a way of using VIDA to validate and visualise impact (e.g, carbon/biomass).