Nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations will get access to more data analytics resources through a new initiative Google LLC announced Wednesday.

The initiative, called Data Solutions for Change, is aimed at nonprofits and NGOs that wish to leverage data analytics and machine learning without worrying about managing the underlying infrastructure, Google said.

“Nonprofits today have the opportunity to access and collect data at an unprecedented scale and many are implementing a data-driven approach to problem-solving,” Carol Carpenter, Google’s vice president of cloud product marketing, said in a blog post. “They need data analytics solutions that don’t require them to manage infrastructure operations, and instead allow them to carry out all types of analytics projects and lay the foundation for AI.”

The new program comes with three components to helps these organizations, including credit grants of up to $5,000 per month for a maximum of six months, self-training lessons through Qwiklabs Inc. and role-based support entitlements.

Google said Data Solutions for Change is helpful because nonprofits are trying to come up with solutions to a wide range of problems that could be beneficial for everyone. The Foundation for Precision Medicine, for example, is trying to use machine learning to create algorithms that can predict whether someone is likely to develop Alzheimer’s Disease. The idea is to discover trends and patterns from millions of anonymized patient records.

But the biggest problem the foundation faces is its limited financial and technical resources, Google said. Before working with Google, its research was limited to just a few laptops and an in-house server, which obviously placed major restrictions on the scope of its work. “We wanted to scale up because we knew we had a good idea,” Ayin Vala, the foundation’s chief data officer, said in a blog post.

Data Solutions for Change enables nonprofits such as the Foundation for Precision Medicine to access some of Google’s most sophisticated cloud services, including its BigQuery service for managing data and Google Data Studio for visualizing insights within that data.

South African nonprofit Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator is another organization that has benefited from Google’s cloud tools. Its mission is to help underprivileged young people in the country find fulfilling employment, which it does by creating an “employability map” using data from job applications and interviews.

The data include job candidates’ education and work experience details, as well as more information about their energy levels and resilience. The social enterprise had already helped to find employment for more than 5,000 young people, but needed help in order to scale up its work.

“Over seven years we collected the data points and an understanding of who succeeds in what jobs,” explained Navid Erfani-Ghadimimi, Harambee’s executive enterprise architect.

Harambee uses Google’s cloud to determine things such as whether a job candidate lives near enough to a specific a place of work and has the ability to succeed in the job.

The Data Solutions for Change program is the latest in a series of initiatives Google has launched for nonprofits and NGOs. Other programs include the Google Earth Outreach initiative, G Suite for Nonprofits, GCP Public Datasets and Kaggle Data Science for Good Events.

Image: Google