If you want to come in first, run alone; if you want to go far, walk together.

This traditional African proverb explains how cooperation and teamwork are essential for achieving goals that go beyond simply reaching a milestone.

What does all this have to do with technology and cloud computing? What is the connection between the world of civic, environmental, and animal rights activism and an indispensable business model? Well, technologists and nonprofits are teaming up. In fact, many organizations in this sector have begun using Amazon Web Services to build increasingly responsive websites where scalability is key. For example, in the case of a fundraising campaign, the website must respond immediately to the needs of donors who want to make a contribution.

So, what do nongovernmental organizations that work to protect the oceans, provide medical care inremote parts of the world, combat child exploitation and abuse, or build networks among farmers around the world have in common? Amazon Web Services Cloud—and we’ll explain why.

In this article, we’ll share four stories about how cloud computing is helping the nonprofit sector. Starting with Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to an issue very close to VMEngine’s heart: the protection of marine ecosystems. With support from AWS, Ocean Conservancy conducts simulations to better understand the stressors affecting the ocean and the effects that climate change is having on underwater ecosystems. The Osiris project (Ocean Systems Interactions, Risks, Instabilities, and Synergies) aims to accelerate our understanding of these risks and identify the earliest indicators of change in ocean health in advance, in order to provide reliable guidance for global policy decisions.

Then there’s Medic Mobile , the NGO that provides medical care even where aspirin is hard to find. It’s an application developed to bring medical care to even the most remote areas of the globe. With the unique ability to work offline, Medic Mobile is used in 23 countries in Africa and Asia and is used by 16,000 healthcare professionals. ” With the goal of supporting 100 million people in the next five years ,” explains Josh Nesbit , CEO of Medic Mobile, “ we ‘re focusing on scalability. Thanks to AWS , we can securely scale our services and bring our toolkit to the smallest clinics in the most remote areas .”

From the world of medicine, we turn to that of protecting the most vulnerable: children. With Thorn, the NGO founded in 2012 whose motto is: “We build technology to defend children from sexual abuse.” It aims to use technological innovation to combat the sexual abuse and exploitation of children by providing law enforcement with information and leads on networks and individuals suspected of crimes against minors. Spotlight, a program developed by Thorn and Digital Reasoning, processes and analyzes—with the support of Amazon Rekognition—data from 150,000 ads per day based on risk profiles provided by law enforcement.“More than 3,200 law enforcement officers use Spotlight in the United States,” AWSexplains in a statement, “including the mobile version, reporting a 65% reduction in the time required to investigate child trafficking cases.”

Finally, there’s WeFarm, the world’s largest network of farmers, which in 2016 launched a knowledge-sharing service that gives farmers around the world the opportunity to exchange information via text message, without needing the internet and without having to leave their farms. To be able to provide quick responses, WeFarm is bringing machine learning and a crowdsourcing approach—via text message (99% of users access WeFarm via text message)—to populations that are currently offline.