About us

About GRID3

GRID3 (Geo-Referenced Infrastructure and Demographic Data for Development) works with countries to generate, validate and use geospatial data on population, settlements, infrastructure, and boundaries. GRID3 combines the expertise of partners in government, United Nations, academia, and the private sector to design adaptable and relevant geospatial solutions based on capacity and development needs of each country.

The programme provides countries with a unique package of tools with which to generate open-source data, support for data applications to ensure effective impact, and training to strengthen the national geospatial foundation for future evidence-based development and humanitarian decision making.

The programme offers a unique and efficient approach, combining the highest-resolution and most recent satellite imagery, dynamic modelling and newest scientific methods, and capacity strengthening services to ensure sustainable use of geospatial data nationally.

Our partners

The Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) is a research center within the Columbia Climate School. Its mission is to provide access to and enhance the use of information worldwide, advancing understanding of human interactions in the environment and serving the needs of science and public and private decision making. Under GRID3, CIESIN leads initiatives around settlement, boundary, and infrastructure mapping.

WorldPop research programme, based at the University of Southampton, is a multi-sectoral team of researchers, technicians, and project specialists that produces data on population distributions and characteristics at high spatial resolution. WorldPop leads population modelling within GRID3.

Our Board

  • Vincent Seaman Vincent Seaman
  • Sonia Ehrlich Sachs Sonia Ehrlich Sachs

Vince Seaman currently works at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, where he is a Senior Program Officer for the Global Development Polio team. In that role, he supports polio eradication efforts and the use of geospatial and other data technologies for Gates Foundation projects worldwide. Prior to joining the Foundation, Dr. Seaman spent 7 years at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and was detailed to Nigeria for three years as a secondee to the World Health Organization, supporting polio and other vaccine-preventable disease programs.

Vince completed his MS and PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of California, Davis in 2006, after spending 15 years practicing as a licensed pharmacist and 8 years as a public high school science teacher in California.

Sonia Ehrlich Sachs, MD, MPH is a pediatrician, an endocrinologist and public health specialist. She received a BA from Harvard University, an MD from the University of Maryland Medical School, and an MPH from Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Sachs practiced medicine for 20 years, 14 of which were at Harvard University Health Services in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the Earth Institute, Columbia University, since 2005 she has led the design and implementation of low-cost primary health systems in low-income rural Africa and India. Her focus is on systems delivery, primarily for improvement of maternal and child health, at local and national scales. Sachs coordinated the health sector of the Millennium Villages Project, overseeing all health-related interventions and research. The Millennium Villages Project, in ten countries in sub-Saharan Africa, was an integrated rural development initiative, designed as a proof of concept, helping poor rural communities accelerate reaching the Millennium Development Goals, using a science-based, community led approach of integrated interventions that increase food production, increase access to health care, education, water, infrastructure and business development. Dr. Sachs was involved in the EI health team advisory to Haiti, India and Nigeria. She is the Director of the One Million CHW Campaign advocating for professionalised Community Health Workers, a cadre that is paid, supervised and supported by use of information communication technology. Sachs and her team currently advise the government of Ghana on the national scale up of Community Health Workers, including the national scale up of mHealth and Telemedicine.

Made possible by