Actress Olivia Wilde is teaming up with a top U.S. economist in a new campaign aimed at improving healthcare in rural Africa.

The Tron: Legacy star already serves as a board member for the Artists for Peace and Justice organisation, which provides education and health services in Haiti, and now the keen philanthropist is looking to take her activism to the poverty-stricken continent by working closely with Jeffrey Sachs, the director of research group The Earth Institute at New York's prestigious Columbia University.

But that's not the only social project Wilde is working on.

She tells Marie Claire magazine, "I'm really excited to be working with Jeffrey Sachs on his community health workers program, which aims to train a million workers to serve the most rural parts of Africa, and to be launching a company called Conscious Commerce that will encourage companies to incorporate a socially conscious element to their business plans. I'm at my happiest when working on this stuff."