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Interview with Juan Ferres, Chief Data Scientist at Microsoft, and Director of the AI for Good Lab   

Maya Plentz 

We are seeing, at COP27, a great push from the private sector to be truly engaged and work together with governments. And one of the issues that is coming up quite a bit in the discussions lately is the fact that the Global South is bearing the brunt of climate change, with extreme weather events happening there more frequently. And then there is the question of the data divide. Can you tell us what is the data divide between the Global South and the North?

Juan Ferres 

It starts with the fact that, from on one side, we have the data collection angle where the majority of the weather data that is collected on the ground is usually more focused in the US, Canada, and Europe as compared to the Global South.  So we did our own research and our own analysis, and particularly in Africa for every data scientist that you have in Africa per capita, there are 15 data scientists in t…