Foreign Aid & Civil Society

Analyzing Google.org Grants

In case you hadn’t heard, Google.org is testing a new innovation in healthcare – trying to track and predict flu epidemics by tracking search queries on Google. THDBlog was fairly clear on why this could be game changing:

…fascinating experiment with a new Google tool on the frontiers of diseases surveillance and global health trends. Remains to be seen how useful this will be and lots of validation needs to be done, but this is yet another example of people outside of traditional health/public health communities who are on the leading edge of public health innovation.

Anyway, that set me thinking on what else Google is up to. Turns out, its fairly easy to find out. So what I did was aggregate their projects, and analyze the resulting spending. Here’s what I found out.

Spending and Type

Google.org has provided USD 110,225,998 in grants and investments. This itself is hardly a huge figure, considering the size of Google, and the ambitions of Google.org. What is interesting is that a large part of this (44%) was spent as investments into renewable energy and plugin hybrid projects.

This makes me wonder why Google.org is spend so much on the “low lying” fruit?

Field of Activity

A look at which areas Google.org spends its money is also illuminating. Again, it seems a large part goes to energy related projects. I have classified energy as renewable energy as well as power related (e.g. plugin-hybrid) projects.

Relatively little is spent on “traditional” philanthropy – health, education, or environment. Again, is there a capacity constraint?

One additional remark: it seems Google.org is funding the World Bank as well. The World Bank Development Marketplace business plan competition received USD 500,000 from Google.

Recipient Country

A look at the distribution of grants, by the country in which organizations are based, is particularly interesting. A few observations:

• It is not surprising that a majority of money goes to US organizations. The US has one of the most developed non-profit and academic sectors. But the scale of that majority is.
• India, curiously, is the second largest recipient of Google.org grants. In hindsight, probably not surprising considering India too has a vibrant civil society and an ambitious social agenda.
• Africa gets the third largest share (USD 7.4 million). Of this, USD 4.2 million goes to East Africa (about 56.7%). It should be noted, though, that a larger amount is probably spent in Africa than in India – because several of the US grants are for projects in Africa.
• Most of the grants to India are in the field of education. Most going to Africa are in the field of health.
• Finally, one thing not evident in these numbers is that Google.org often funds technology related projects. HealthMap, for instance, gets two grants. Other grants also focus on weather monitoring, satellite monitoring, and other climate systems that feed into disease control systems. Clearly, the Flu project isn’t Google.org’s only innovation.

In concluding, I can make two overarching statements.

First, Google.org’s spending suggests there is an absorption capacity constraint within the broader non-profit sector. Could it be that there just aren’t enough good projects for Google to fund?

And second, while a majority of projects benefit the developing world, the US-centric spending pattern suggests Google.org is embracing Jagdish Bhagwati’s idea, that if you cannot spend in Africa, spend for Africa, elsewhere:

© 2008 The Discomfort Zone.