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Good practice Imported

Novissi — AI-targeted emergency cash transfers in Togo

Togo · Lomé · See the Togo profile · See the Lomé profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 14% 80/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

To rush COVID aid to the poorest, Togo used machine learning on satellite imagery and mobile-phone data to target cash transfers — reaching 138,500+ people with ~US$10M and improving targeting precision by 42%.

138,500+
People enrolled and paid
~10 million USD
Total emergency cash disbursed
42 %
Improvement in targeting precision vs. simple geographic targeting
Novissi — AI-targeted emergency cash transfers in Togo

Details

Promoter
Government of Togo (with GiveDirectly, CEGA & IPA)
Keywords
Data, forecasting & decision support, cash transfers, machine learning, satellite & mobile data, social protection

Context

Novissi is Togo's COVID-19 emergency cash-transfer programme, run by the Togolese government together with GiveDirectly, UC Berkeley's CEGA and IPA, created to reach the country's poorest residents quickly when no reliable income registry existed.

Activities

The partnership used machine-learning models trained on high-resolution satellite imagery and mobile-phone call-detail records to estimate household wealth at fine geographic and individual levels, then used these estimates to decide who received emergency cash payments.

Results

The programme enrolled and paid more than 138,500 of the poorest Togolese around US$10 million in emergency cash; the ML-based targeting is reported to have been about 42% more precise than simple geographic targeting of the poorest cantons.

Conclusions

The page describes this as a landmark of data-driven social protection, while noting that phone-based targeting can exclude people without phones, and that inferring wealth from personal data raises privacy questions the research team says it partly addressed through differential-privacy methods.

Implementation

Implementation detail (cost, timeline, staffing, conditions for success) is not yet available for this practice.

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

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