R&D

We partnered with Participedia and seven other universities and organizations to launch the School on Transnational Democratic Innovations. This initiative connected students and practitioners worldwide with leading experts to learn about and design transnational processes to address global challenges. Participants drew inspiration from the world’s first Global Citizens’ Assembly, the coordinators of the Conference on the Future of Europe, prominent academics in democratic innovation and transnational governance, and activists advocating for UN reform. The event took place simultaneously at two decentralized locations: Memorial University in St. John’s, Canada, and the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. For more information, see Participedia’s report here.

We partnered with UNESCO and launched the #Don’tGoViral campaign to address the problem of misinformation on the African continent. Working together with musicians and artists like Bobby Wine (Member of Parliament in Uganda), Youssou Ndour (Former Minister of Tourism of Senegal) and Didier Awadi (Rapper from Senegal) #Don’tGoViral went viral quickly, soliciting applications from artists throughout the continent, and reaching 200 million people in less than 6 weeks via TV, Radio and online.

In this joint publication, UNESCO and the Innovation for Policy Foundation (i4Policy) distill ten essential lessons for policymakers to harness the collective intelligence of communities and ensure that the process of developing and implementing AI public policy is inclusive. The report builds on the output of co-creation workshops, expert interviews, an analysis of case studies, in-house expertise and experience with multi-stakeholder approaches globally.https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000382570

The Pan-African Youth Assembly was part of Project Jollof, a transformational initiative that aimed at helping young people unleash their power through co-creation, community, capacity building and peer learning. It was a multi-stakeholder partnership between i4Policy and private sector actors, such as Meta and civil society organizations. The Pan-African Youth Assembly (#pAYA) aimed at increasing community and youth leaders’ participation in policy-making processes by strengthening knowledge, understanding and civic engagement. We convened young Africans to come together, connect, share experiences, and good practices and engage with their communities using different advocacy resources we brought to them. Policy Brief_Digital Transformation via Youth Inclusion_Long Version.pdf

The #i4Policy community also co-created an Open Letter on COVID-19, calling on governments to work together with citizens. Alongside the momentum of the #DontGoViral campaign, we launched a continental online assembly to crowdsource ideas for response and recovery, that we called the pan-African Digital Assembly. With 39,000 + viewers, over 200 innovation hubs across Africa, panel discussions and interviews with leaders at the community and continental level, and an open forum with 400 + entrepreneurs, the #pADA crowdsourced 482 policy actions for response and recovery.