Data & AI
for social purpose
Data and AI can be powerful tools for advancing public value, social inclusion, and improved quality of life when designed and used ethically. Rather than replacing the workforce, AI should support sustainable prosperity and open new ways to understand research questions and address social challenges. This includes unlocking community wellbeing with administrative data, ensuring that technological innovation aligns with citizens’ aspirations, and navigating risks such as the militarisation of AI. Building the right mechanisms, capacities, and governance models is essential to ensuring that science and technology genuinely advance social wellbeing.
What we do
Under this theme, we seek to re-design models, tools and practices to unlock fresh knowledge that can drive prosperity for the 21st century, through collaborating with citizens, policymakers, service providers and technology innovators.
Our Projects
-
This is a 10-year study tracking the prosperity of over 4,000 households in 15 areas of east London where large-scale and long-term urban regeneration is driving rapid physical, economic, and social changes in local communities.
-
The IGP's Citizen Prosperity Index is designed to encapsulate meaningful data at a level that makes sense to communities, and which can be relayed back to government for policy-making
-
This project explores whether government agencies can use behavioural data – administrative and other data that records the activities and acts of community members – to gain additional insight into place-based community wellbeing.
-
Funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme, this ambitious project will create a holistic framework that quantifies the multidimensional benefits of social services beyond financial metrics.
-
A community-led research project has been exploring what prosperity means to people living in three unplanned settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania – Mji Mpya, Bonde La Mpunga, and Keko Machungwa.
-
The Hamra Prosperity Index project empowered teams of citizen scientists to develop targeted interventions based on the needs identified through their research in Beirut's Hamra neighborhood.
-
The Mina Prosperity Index is a localized, participatory research project designed to measure prosperity beyond GDP. It uses citizen scientists to evaluate community-defined indicators, focusing on infrastructure, health, and social well-being.
Featured
Building A Citizen Prosperity Index for east London: New evidence and a new approach to tackling inequalities
Report
This report launches the Institute for Global Prosperity’s Citizen Prosperity Index for east London: a new way of conceptualising and measuring prosperity based on long-term research about the determinants of prosperity foocal communities.
Redefining prosperity with and for communities in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Beyond economic metrics for African cities
Working Paper
The Maisha Bora Index examines prosperity patterns across three unplanned settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Mji Mpya, Bonde la Mpunga, and Keko Machungwa.
Prosperity in east London 2021-2031 longitudinal study: Outputs and impact from Wave 1 and Plans for Wave 2
Report
This document summarises the outputs and impacts from the first wave of research, undertaken in 2021–2022, and plans for the second wave, which will be undertaken in 2025–2026.