Apolitical

Governments everywhere — weakened by democratic decline and long overlooked by tech entrepreneurs — are antiquated and ill-equipped to solve the 21st century’s challenges and seize its opportunities. Covid and climate change have shown the world the price of forgetting this and have also given governments a new license to legislate and spend with record boldness. But the gap in government knowledge and skills puts at risk the money and momentum lined up behind the greatest challenges of our time. Apolitical is addressing this gap scalably with a global learning platform for government, powered by a unique network and data. The rapid adoption of online learning due to Covid-19 has given us a tailwind. The Elevate Prize would help us rapidly build on what’s already working, investing in our product to expand from serving 100,000+ government officials in 170 countries to millions. It would do so at a time when governments need 21st century skills more than ever. Prize money would help us develop the product and the additional support would help develop brand awareness and partnerships that are key for successful growth and deepening impact.

I grew up in Botswana, which shaped me in two key ways. First, it made me care deeply about global challenges; my father was a bush doctor during the AIDS epidemic, the world’s worst. Second, I did not go to school until I was 15, which made me an entrepreneur. I studied bioinformatics at Auckland University, followed by a business and bioscience degree, hosted in Cambridge UK and partly taught by MIT. Later, I founded a social enterprise in South Africa teaching coding to prisoners, the second program in the world to do so. But innovation and impact aside, the work proved very downstream: most of the prisoners I met were in prison because they’d been let down by policy. I founded Apolitical because I wanted to work upstream, with the people in government who had the leverage to work on the causes of problems. To do so, I teamed up with my American co-founder, Lisa Witter, whose background is in government. Apolitical’s mission is to build 21st century governments that work for everyone, by equipping public servants with the knowledge, skills and tools they need to be effective. Realising our vision means reaching 200 million+ people working in government.

Government is the world’s largest and arguably most powerful workforce. In rich countries, the public sector employs around 20% of the total workforce. In developing countries the figure is often more than 30%. Public officials directly control around 40% of global GDP, and influence the entire economy through regulations, incentives, and direct spending. Yet the 200 million strong government workforce is one of the world’s worst prepared for the 21st century’s complex, fast-moving problems. Central to this lack of preparedness — and the errors and wastage that result — is the antiquated and analog state of government knowledge sharing and upskilling solutions: McKinsey has calculated that if governments just did what was already working elsewhere it would save them $3.5 trillion dollars a year. Apolitical is an online network and learning platform for government that delivers knowledge and skills in a way that is: relevant (knowledge and digital courses informed by the practical, insights of a global network of public servants tackling common or related problems), affordable (our engaged public service network enables modestly priced but high quality digital learning driven by social learning), and motivating (inspiring social learning experiences including bite-sized courses and insights from the global network).

Closing the government knowledge and learning gap scalably requires i) unlocking the knowledge that already exists in the heads and note books of public servants, ii) harvesting, organising, and curating existing canonical policy knowledge that is currently fragmented across policy databases that are hard to query (according to its own data, a third of the World Bank’s reports are never downloaded), and iii) enabling public servants to deepen their skills with courses grounded in practical knowledge. No one has done either i), ii), or iii) well. Apolitical has figured out how to combine all three into a powerful and coherent product experience. First, by building a high trust global network of public servants and making it easy and rewarding for them to share insights with their peers. Second, by harvesting content from around the web and incorporating this into our knowledge graph, the “GovGraph”. This is built on a leading semantic reasoning technology, RDFox, created by Oxford University spinout, Oxford Semantic Technologies. This graph enables reasoning across a diverse corpus of data (UGC, externally harvested reports, user profiles and behaviour data). Third, by partnering with content experts to create bite-sized courses, informed by user needs.

We've built a product designed to solve the specific needs of government identified through hundreds of conversations with public servants in 90+ countries. And we are constantly refining our product based on qualitative and quantitative data from our platform. It’s working. We're used by 100,000+ public servants in 170 countries. 83% of users of our network say it makes them more effective in their jobs. 95% of members who take our courses would recommend the product to others. 66% are able to apply their learnings in their jobs within two months of taking a course. This translates into significant positive impact on society in the form of better policymaking. We have numerous specific impact examples including i) a European government reviewing our list of the top 100 climate policies globally in order to incorporate the highest impact climate policies into their climate strategy, and ii), still on climate, a course on sustainable finance for public servants (commissioned by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and developed by the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University) being oversubscribed ahead of COP 26. We've also created a non-profit foundation focused on revitalising democracy http://apoliticalacademy.globa...