Fastrack Institute on Innovate for Africa Challenge- Pilot Partnership

The Imperative for Bottom-up Decision-Making
Africa is at a crossroads. The continent is undergoing a period of unprecedented growth. Nearly 50% of the world’s 40 fastest-growing economies are in Africa. Transcontinental free trade is connecting Africa, strengthening the region and benefiting over 1 billion people. Half of Africa’s nations experienced changes in political leadership within the last three years.
With enormous growth come equally enormous challenges.

Pilot and Partnership Announcement

Launching this month in South Africa at Africa Tech Week, Swae will be partnering with the Fastrack Institute on an open innovation challenge to crowdsource the best solutions for Africa’s most pressing challenges, directly from its citizens!

The goal of this pilot is to design and implement citizen-led ideas and solutions to the region’s greatest challenges.

Together with the Fastrack Institute, we are proud to announce this open innovation challenge, for all citizens of Africa, envisioning an Africa, made for and by the people.

Phases 1 & 2

In the first phase of this pilot citizens, partners and sponsors will use the Swae platform to identify and suggest possible solutions to key problem areas throughout the continent. Leveraging Swae, citizens will engage in idea creation, through our discovery methodology, AI augmentation and open deliberation methods, to design and collectively to contribute to a breadth of issue areas that concern them. In particular, citizens will be able to view, comment, and vote on other submissions raising their importance in the platform. At the end of this phase, the top ideas will be refined and improved through the collective deliberation process, and will proceed to the next phase for an innovation sprint guided by The Fastrack Institute. Any resident in the continent of Africa is encouraged and welcome to participate.

Goals for Swae — What We Hope To Learn
We’re incredibly excited to be providing the digital tools to enable decision makers and citizens the opportunity to design solutions together. If successful, this pilot can lead to scaling other approaches to community driven and informed interventions and decisions in Sub-Saharan Africa. We believe this is a fundamental step in how the future of governance processes and decision-making should scale. On our side, this opportunity allows us to test key hypotheses, particularly around our ability to develop high-quality, decision-ready ideas for serious consideration/feasibility testing and implementation — through a combination of our methodology and digital features (anonymity, idea augmentation, commenting, voting). We’ll also be measuring key indicators on diversity of participants involved in a given idea and whether that leads to more fully formed and holistically representative solutions in addition testing our augmented intelligence features in a new context and geography.
If you would like Swae to help your company, organization or community raise the inclusivity, quality, and intelligence of decisions, please get in touch directly here

More information
You can find out more about the Innovate for Africa Challenge and get involved here: 

About Swae
Swae is an AI-driven decision-making and governance platform that helps raise the quality and inclusivity of decisions within organizations, allowing people to participate directly in key strategy, budget, operational decisions and create solutions from the bottom up that can be institutionalized. By combining anonymity, artificial, and collective intelligence Swae helps organizations unleash the creativity of their stakeholders, discover new unrevealed ideas, and collectively build bottom-up solutions to strategy and resource allocation decisions, and improving overall decision quality without significant work for management.

About FTI
Fastrack Institute is a non-profit organization achieving social impact through injection of knowledge and technology to enable cities to adapt to and capitalize on rapid technological change alongside rapid urban population growth. They work together with member cities to find cutting edge, scalable solutions to grand urban challenge. They focus primarily on solving urban problems for cities and regions of one million or more citizens, although they do work with smaller cities and communities.

Their mission is to inspire, educate and empower cities and their citizens to find cutting edge, scalable ways to solve critical urban challenges 10X faster and cheaper than previously thought possible.