During the HLPF 2016, the Development Policy and Analysis Division/DESA organized an Event on “Modelling Tools for Sustainable Development Policies: A platform to address the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development”. During the event Mr. Lenni Montiel, ASG for Economic Development of DESA, announced Ms. Monica Chelliah as the winner of the #Electricity4All Python Challenge.

The Challenge, launched by OICT and DESA in collaboration with the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH-Sweden), was an open call for students, programmers and data scientists to improve the Universal Access to Electricity Tool, one of the models that are hosted in DESA’s web platform: “Modelling Tools for Sustainable Development Policies”. The tool, developed by KTH, in collaboration with DESA, provides an assessment of different options to achieve universal access to electricity by 2030 in 44 African countries.

The model uses geospatial data in order to estimate, analyze and visualize the most cost effective electrification option (grid, mini grid & stand-alone) for electrifying presently unserved areas, aiming at ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all (SDG 7).

The winning submission of Ms. Monica Chelliah, a New York City-based associate software developer, provided an elegant and well-written code in Python, an open source programming language, using the hashing technique for finding nearest neighbors. Her solution managed to reduce the computational time of the model from 50 hours to approximately 3.5 minutes and is currently being used by UN/DESA and KTH colleagues to update and expand the Universal Access to Electricity Tool to other regions. The new developments will be launched later this year in UN/DESA’s web-based platform “Modelling Tools for Sustainable Development Policies”.

The #Electricity4All Python challenge is an example of the innovative contributions different communities of practice, such as developers, programmers and data scientists can provide in our joint efforts to make modelling tools accessible to countries to inform their policy decision making processes for sustainable development.