What if public health could act before people became infected?
That question sits at the heart of a new partnership between NALA, the Lemonade Foundation, and the University of Haifa. Together, we are launching a pilot project that explores how artificial intelligence, satellite remote sensing, and field research can help predict disease risk before transmission occurs.
The project focuses on schistosomiasis (also known as bilharzia), a neglected tropical disease that affects more than 250 million people worldwide. Today, public health programmes identify areas for intervention using surveillance data, prevalence surveys, and field assessments. Guided by this evidence, disease control programmes have dramatically reduced the burden of disease. However, these approaches are inherently reactive, as they rely on understanding where transmission has already taken place.
We believe there is another way.
Over the next 12 months, the partnership will pilot an AI-powered early warning system that combines satellite imagery, environmental indicators, epidemiological data, and field validation to identify communities at increased risk of transmission. Rather than asking where disease has already occurred, the model asks where it is likely to occur next.
This is not about replacing public health expertise with artificial intelligence. It is about strengthening it.
For more than 15 years, NALA has worked alongside governments and communities to understand how neglected tropical diseases spread and, more importantly, how they can be prevented. Every environmental assessment, every community visit, every water point mapped, and every snail sample collected has helped build an understanding of transmission that now provides the foundation for this next step.
Artificial intelligence allows us to bring those pieces together in a new way. By combining years of field experience with high-resolution satellite data and machine learning, we hope to identify patterns that would otherwise remain invisible and enable earlier, more targeted public health action.
The pilot will begin in two communities in Ethiopia, where model predictions will be tested against real-world conditions through field surveys, environmental monitoring, and close collaboration with local teams. The aim is not simply to develop a better model, but to validate whether this approach can support practical decision-making for governments and public health programmes.
If successful, the implications extend far beyond two communities.
The long-term vision is to create a scalable, open-source resource that can help governments, NGOs, and researchers identify disease risk earlier, target interventions more effectively, and ultimately shift global health from reacting to outbreaks to preventing them.
This partnership marks the next chapter in that journey.
The Lemonade Foundation aims to use technological innovation to yield outsized positive social impact through partnerships with leading scientists, tech startups, and NGOs. The University of Haifa advances the partnership through its expertise, helping bridge academic research and real-world public health impact.
Innovation has always been central to NALA’s work. Whether developing new community engagement approaches, strengthening WASH systems, or embedding prevention into government policy, our goal has always been the same: to prevent disease before it starts.