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About us

Our team comes from the Innovation & Research department of the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). It combines operational experience connected to the SDGs with the technical expertise of data scientists specialised in natural language processing and deep learning.
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Innovate.
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From a research project to a full-fledged tool

The SDG Prospector is the result of a research project initiated in 2021 by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD).

The team

  • Régis Marodon

    Régis is senior advisor on sustainable finance at the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). Ph.D in Economics, he joined the AFD group in 1989, where he contributed to development financing in many African, Mediterranean and Latin American countries and was successively Director for Turkey, Mexico and Latin America. He joined AFD’s advisory staff in 2016 on sustainable finance matters and since then participates in numerous research and international networks on this topic.

  • Jean-Baptiste Jacouton

    Jean-Baptiste is a research officer on sustainable finance at the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). He joined the AFD group in 2021, where he concentrates on the role and challenges of Public Development Banks in SDG financing. Using big data, he explores new methodologies for systematic SDG reporting in favor of impact finance. In light of the Finance in Common movement, he is involved in coordinating the International Research Initiative on Public Development Banks.

  • Adeline Laulanié

    Adeline Laulanié is a data officer at the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). She started her career as a statistician 20 years ago. Since then she has always worked on data-related subjects, including datascience and Artificial Intelligence, in various fields such as energy, humanitarian or banking sectors in several countries (Malaysia, Denmark, Pakistan, etc.). She joined AFD in 2018 to work on data governance and data science projects such as the SDG Prospector.

  • François Bullier

    François Bullier is a freelance data scientist. Using his expertise, he creates dedicated solutions based on machine learning models that help companies gain a better understanding of their data, leading to improved business outcomes. He has experience as a customer knowledge manager in the distribution industry and has worked on various use cases in the energy sector and in sustainable finance. Overall, his diverse background and his independent approach allow him to offer valuable insights to his clients.

The team extends special thanks to partners and colleagues who participated in preparatory sessions, and who contributed to the creation and dissemination of the SDG Prospector. 

The Finance in Common Summit, created in 2020 as the first global coalition of public development banks (PDBs), constituted a strong case for the team. The challenge was to develop a tool able to analyze the SDG content of thousands of activity reports produced by PDBs. And it worked!

More than 1000 reports were collected and analyzed, providing a reliable mapping
of their SDG narrative.

Research papers : Revealing the SDGs
with Artificial Intelligence

Have a look at the research publication that was presented at the 2022 Finance in Common Summit in Abidjan.

Read the reasearch

From there, the team started to extend the tool to other types of documents, keeping the same methodological rigor and pioneering techniques to extend the capacity of the SDG Prospector to map any type of documents.

The research was enlarged to dialogue with other institutions following the same path. OECD, UNDESA, European commission, UNEP,…

In 2022, the team joined the SDG Expert Meet-Up set up by the Global Goals Directory. By bringing together the leading experts in the field, this group aims at promoting knowledge sharing and collaboration to foster the use of new technologies in favor of the 2030 Agenda. All these efforts provide project officers, financial analysts, country officers, journalists and citizens with reliable solutions to identify and classify SDG-related contents.

A tool open to cooperation

The SDG Prospector is now mature enough to be shared as a common. This is the time for you to analyse your documents, and share with us the value added or disappointment that the SDG Prospector is bringing to your work.

Whether you are an organisation wishing to use the tool on a large sample of documents, or you want to help us improving the tool, please contact us.

Contact us