Welcome to The Leaf: Stories of Data for Impact, Nexleaf’s platform for sharing stories shaped by data.
The Leaf will traverse the world, from our headquarters in Los Angeles to the ‘last mile,’ to recount how real-world impact is fostered by data. The last mile includes health workers in rural facilities in Tanzania administering safe vaccines to children or a woman in a remote village in India providing sustenance to her family.
Many times at Nexleaf, we’re asked if we focus on climate change, hardware design, or grassroots implementation. Our answer is we do all of this and more. The scope of our work is wide, and that’s because complex problems – like climate change or global health – require multi-dimensional solutions.
Our flagship technologies, StoveTrace and ColdTrace, are built for different sectors, but they serve a similar purpose. That’s because, while immunization and clean cooking seem so distinct from each other, the poorest 3 billion still lack access to these basic, yet life-saving, necessities. The technologies we develop gather data to reveal problems at the last mile, and with that data, we identify gaps in infrastructure, supply chains, and knowledge.
So far, we’ve learned that rural women want to transition to clean energy but need products that adapt to their lives. We initially assumed that distributing improved cookstoves and paying women to use them would be enough to displace polluting methods of cooking. Turns out, rural women, like other consumers around the world, want appliances that fit their needs and that withstand the environments they live in.
Similarly, with millions of dollars being invested in vaccines, we have to wonder whether these efforts are working or not. Oftentimes, large, global initiatives such as immunization campaigns involve multiple stakeholders and subsequently become too siloed to succeed. Data lends us a common language to discuss how to fix what’s broken. With our partners and supporters, we can rally around the same datasets and create solutions that foster transformative change.
We invite people to read The Leaf to witness the power of data, react to discoveries and failures, and challenge established norms in development.