Accelerating Mission-Driven Impact: Analytics for a Better World Kicks Off with Bold Vision

At the recent Analytics for a Better World (ABW) Kickoff Event, leaders from academia, industry, and the nonprofit sector gathered—both in person and online—to reflect on past impact and share bold ambitions for the future of data science in service of the global good.

A Mission Rooted in Urgency and Opportunity

Founded three years ago by the University of Amsterdam and Ortec, ABW operates on a powerful premise: analytics can and must be leveraged to help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With only 15% of the SDGs currently on track and five years remaining, the need for scalable, data-driven interventions is greater than ever.

Yet, the social impact sector remains underserved. While 3.5 million data professionals are needed globally in this space, only half of nonprofits understand the potential of analytics. ABW exists to change that.

Three Years of Growing Impact

In just three years, ABW has:

Trained over 250 mission-driven changemakers
Conducted 17 impact projects with 16 nonprofits
Collaborated with 27 researchers from 9 universities
Engaged 261 contributors
Enabled 14 students to graduate with ABW-related theses

Notable project partners include Médecins Sans Frontières, War Child, The Ocean Cleanup, and MapAction. These collaborations addressed a range of issues, including vaccine clinic routing and donor prediction, as well as optimizing waste collection in Nairobi and strategic planning in microfinance.

ABW also launched a Fellowship Program, which has graduated 113 participants who completed projects and built a growing online community through recorded classes, webinars, and a Slack network.

Turning Science into Impact—and Back Again

Science to Impact Director and co-founder Prof. Dick den Hertog emphasized the two-way relationship between academia and practice. From optimizing healthcare access in Nepal and Vietnam to routing ocean-cleaning vessels through plastic-dense waters, ABW’s projects serve both the communities they help and the scientific literature they advance.

In one standout example, ABW’s optimization work with The Ocean Cleanup helped reduce expected costs and duration of ocean cleaning by nearly 50%. That work was recently published in Operations Research, one of the field’s leading journals.

Tools That Scale: The PISA Toolkit

Parvathi Krishnan shared the progress created with ABW’s open-source toolkit, PISA (Public Infrastructure Service Access), which has been used in Armenia, Kenya, Timor-Leste, Vietnam, and Nepal to identify optimal locations for clinics, labs, and other critical infrastructure. PISA enables large-scale, low-cost accessibility analysis and is supported by a growing network of contributors from academia and private partners like ORTEC, DHL, CorrelAid, and More Optimal.

Looking Ahead: Focus and Scale

Recognizing the need to sharpen its impact, ABW announced it will focus proactively on:

Good Health and Wellbeing (SDG 3)
Clean Water and Sanitation (SDG 6)
Climate Action (SDG 13)

To support these goals, ABW is planning to launch:

A year-long Accelerator Program for five nonprofits annually, offering deep strategic and technical support
A self-service PISA platform to empower nonprofits worldwide
A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) initiative to train 100,000 nonprofit professionals in analytics, starting with courses on data storytelling, geospatial optimization, machine learning, and generative AI

Join the Movement

To realize this ambitious vision, ABW is calling on partners across sectors:

Nonprofits with compelling use cases
Companies willing to contribute in-kind expertise or software
Researchers and developers to help build and improve open-source tools
Funders to support and scale high-impact programs

Analytics for a Better World is more than a research institute—it’s a growing global community of changemakers. Together, we are proving that with the right tools, knowledge, and collaboration, data can be a powerful force for good.