AI agents slash humanitarian crisis research time

Prosper Global, formerly Mercy Corps, has built VERA, a multi-agent AI research engine developed with Cloudera, running on AWS and using Anthropic models. VERA pulls from sources including ReliefWeb, ACLED and local news to accelerate crisis research. In Sudan, it cut agricultural desk research from five or six days to two, saving around $1,500. In Colombia, a non-specialist produced an election security report in hours. Active in Sudan, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Ukraine, VERA is designed as a starting point for analysts, not a replacement for human research judgment.