Case Study: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation targets $8M in Indian agriculture with SocialCops

Using Data to Invest $8 Million in Indian Agriculture

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with SocialCops to help target an $8 million investment for small and marginal farmers in Bihar, Odisha, and Uttar Pradesh. Their challenge was that India’s agriculture data was scattered, inconsistent, and difficult to use for identifying where funding would have the greatest impact across priorities like female empowerment, agricultural extension, and nutrition.

SocialCops built a data-driven targeting platform that aggregated and cleaned information from 31 public data sources covering 209 indicators across 9 layers, then turned each layer into comparable scores. The resulting interactive dashboard gave the Gates Foundation state and district views, geospatial mapping, an intelligent query engine, and access to raw data, enabling clearer investment decisions and easier identification of geographic clusters and focus areas.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Melinda Gates

Co-Chair