At this session, Project Connect will discuss its goal to map every school in the world and measure connectivity at schools. Project Connect is a new non-profit created in January of 2017, working to provide online mapping of every school in the world, including real-time data about the quality of each school’s connectivity, in order to create an observable metric of the progress towards enabling educational access and opportunity for all students. 

We are working on three main lines of effort. The first is partnering with governments and NGOs to collect existing data about school location and internet connectivity. Early on in this process, we will also combine existing data on school locations with high-resolution satellite imagery and machine learning to determine if we are able to develop an algorithm that can ultimately find schools. We are also conducting several on the ground data collection and crowd-sourcing pilots. Project Connect will also do country-specific operational research projects, where we work with providers to connect schools to explore models of connectivity.