Built & Running
Canopy
AI education platform that turns each day's news into IB-curriculum-mapped briefings across 172 countries, scored against the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
Why it exists
IB students study the SDGs in five subjects and almost never see how those goals connect to the day's actual news. Canopy closes that gap. Each morning, a pipeline pulls fresh articles from twelve outlets, among them NewsAPI, The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC, Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle, Google News, UN News, IPS, France 24, and ReliefWeb, strips out duplicate coverage of the same event, and narrows hundreds of candidates down to the six stories worth a student's time. Each one gets an SDG tag, up to three mapped IB subjects (Economics, Global Politics, ESS, Biology, Geography), two discussion questions, four key terms, and a link back to the original reporting.
A separate system handles the data side. Every quarter it pulls World Bank indicator data for the same 172 countries and turns it into scored SDG profiles with tracked trajectories. This feeds the Observatory and the country pages, and runs on a separate pipeline from the daily news.
It's free for students and teachers, and it has run daily since May 14, 2026.
750+ stories published since May 2026 · 172 countries scored · 17 SDG goals
Canopy dashboard: country-level SDG tracking
172
Countries
Daily
Pipeline
17
SDG Goals
Observatory view
Homepage showcase
What it actually covers
The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals are the framework. Canopy connects them to two different kinds of evidence: what's in the news right now, and what the underlying indicator data says over time.
The daily briefing
Each morning, the pipeline reads hundreds of articles across twelve outlets and picks the six most relevant to sustainable development. Each story is mapped to the IB syllabus: subject, discussion questions, key terms, and on request a printable exam-style worksheet, cached after the first generation so it costs nothing to serve the next student. Every story links back to its original source, so readers can always check the reporting Canopy draws on.
The Observatory
Country-level SDG scores and trajectories, sourced from the World Bank's open data API and refreshed quarterly. Built for the question a news feed can't answer: which countries are actually moving on SDG 13 (climate action), which have stalled on SDG 4 (education), and how two countries compare side by side.
The weekly brief
Once a week, a second pipeline curates eight stories into a longer newsletter, with its own discussion prompts per subject, and sends it straight to subscribers' inboxes.
Why "implementation gap" and not just "SDG news"
Most SDG coverage tracks announcements: pledges, summits, targets set. Canopy tracks what comes after: the legislation passed or shelved, the budget allocated or cut, the policy promised in 2015 and still unimplemented in 2026. The gap between a government's stated position and its actual record is usually where the story is.
The stack
Frontend
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Vite
Backend
- Python
- FastAPI
- PostgreSQL
- Resend (email)
AI Layer
- Claude API (Haiku + Sonnet)
- Prompt caching
- Vision image checks
- Two scheduled pipelines
Infrastructure
- Vercel (frontend)
- Render (API)
- GitHub Actions (pipelines)
- cron-job.org (keep-alive)
