The world is facing monumental threats ranging from disease outbreaks and climate change to nuclear conflict and deepening inequality.

The truth is that nation states alone cannot anticipate, prevent, mitigate, and adapt to the world’s most intractable problems. Complex challenges need the cognitive diversity of many different stakeholders in order to reveal robust, multi-layered solutions.

To this end, in 2020 – on the UN’s 75th anniversary – UN Member States marked the occasion by adopting a Declaration on “the future we want and the United Nations we need” that called for action across 12 areas that are crucial for humanity’s collective future, and requesting the Secretary-General to report back by September 2021 with further ideas and recommendations “to advance our common agenda”.

Thereafter, the United Nations began a consultation process with the global public and a wide range of stakeholders across different sectors of society to gather views on the world’s most pressing challenges and priorities for building a better future. They requested input on new ways we could improve international problem solving and cooperation, to strengthen existing approaches and fill known gaps. Groups included companies, philanthropic groups, non-governmental organizations, universities, unions, minority, disability rights activists, and others.

The mosaic of actors included reflects the spirit of the UN Charter, which begins with the memorable statement: “We the Peoples”.

To help the UN Secretary-General deliver on his promise, the Igarapé Institute found Swae to be the best solution on the market to launch and facilitate the UN’s global consultation crowdsourcing creative proposals from constituents from all corners of the world.

Their hope was to reveal creative solutions to tackle the biggest challenges to the world’s largest threats!

A key priority of the consultation was to identify action-oriented recommendations to help the international community confront and adapt to new and emerging challenges, as well as bold actionable strategies to bolster the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Climate Agreement.

The proposals collected helped elaborate new ways to rapidly accelerate delivery of the commitments made by governments in the UN75 Declaration adopted by the General Assembly in 2020.

Results of the UN’s Public Digital Consultation

Between April and May 2021, the public digital consultation generated 523 proposals from 1,759 thought leaders from 147 countries on Swae’s platform. This We the Peoples consultation exceeded expectations in terms of the diversity of engagement and geographic reach of participants.

With support from more than 30 civil society partners across the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia, inputs were received from leading NGOs, impact investors, philanthropists, parliamentarians, city leaders, academic institutions and under-represented groups such as minorities, migrants and conflict-affected communities, on solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing the world and how we might adapt the UN and other multilateral organizations to problem-solve better.

Among other things, the collection of civil society groups participating in digital consultation called for:

• • A global system that genuinely accounts for future generations and embraces inclusion;
  • The prioritization of climate change as a global priority with redoubled investment in climate action;
  • Much greater ambition from the UN through a reinvigorated multilateralism to avoid a global breakdown.

All contributors called for greater ambition in how our multilateral organizations adapt and rise to meet the challenges facing the world. Nonprofits and private sector experts alike offered a wide range of practical and concrete recommendations on climate action.

Some of the proposals submitted reflect a large constellation of voices. For instance, contributors such as the International Trade Union Confederation, the United Cities and Local Government network, and the Inter-Parliamentary Union represent hundreds of millions of people across the world. Civil society groups, such as Together First, Minority Rights Group and CIVICUS have hundreds of members, including small grassroots groups and offline communities, in all regions.

Proposals were analyzed using a combination of qualitative and quantitative criteria. In consultation with a group of experts, the Igarapé Institute considered factors such as the specificity, possible impact, actionability, innovation, and transformative potential of submissions, as well as the level of engagement they elicited from other participants.

The agenda put forward by the Secretary-General to the UN General Assembly is one of the most far-reaching and comprehensive strategies ever produced by the U.N. It was crafted on the basis of consultations involving over 1.5 million people from around the world.

The impact of using Swae

We asked users of Swae’s We The People’s consultation how they found the experience; here’s what they said:

This consultation received a diverse and wide-ranging response rate at the gender and age level, a benefit of using Swae as it takes the bias out of the ideation process!

The digital consultation enjoyed a very strong and healthy gender parity and participation rates amongst users, recording a 48% Female vs 50% Male participation rate.

The highest sub-group of under-represented minorities participating on the platform and consultation were“Women and Girls”!

The digital consultation benefited from a very healthy and equitable distribution of age ranges participating in the process (with the exception of users under the age of 15). Most age categories had a similar distribution of total users.

For example:

• Users age 16-30 had 26% participation rate (467)
• Users age 31-45 had 30% participation rate (531)
• Users age 46-60 had 25% participation rate (456)
• Users aged 61+ had 19% participation rate (336)

“Global challenges demand global solutions, and our team at Swae were very proud that our startup was able to rise to the occasion and support an international institution as important as the United Nations to carry out such an important and timely initiative.

We urgently need to improve the quality of exchange between the general public and decision-makers, and Swae helped make this a reality. The consultation helped prove that the speed, diversity and user experience of consultation processes can fundamentally improve, even for critical institutions such as the United Nations.

The nature of the digital consultation – crowdsourcing actionable suggestions to global challenges in an open, inclusive, and collaborative manner – was unprecedented for soliciting inputs. Unlike previous consultations that are often closed, non-collaborative, and one-directional, anyone in the world had access to the platform, and while most were invited, anyone who did join could engage in proposals and thoughts to help refine ideas further.

The combination of the deliberative design and Swae’s feature set helped organizers expand the boundaries of inclusion to people and organizations often not necessarily part of UN high-level processes. This is critical for creating buy-in to the scale of changes we need, as well as surfacing good quality solutions that may not be getting decision-makers’ attention.

Another source of pride for us as a team was how on-the-ground partners combined with the feature set of Swae (e.g. conditional anonymity) allowed organizers to gather inputs from lesser-heard voices and offline communities. For example, the highest sub-group of under-represented minorities participating on the platform and consultation were “Women and Girls”, who traditionally are less represented and vocal in such processes.

Beyond transparency and inclusion, I’m most proud that the results stemming from the consultation had a meaningful influence on the UN Secretary-General’s strategy and recommendations to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges. Much of his strategy references findings and recommendations from the digital consultation, and while this may have been possible without us, it would have been infinitely more challenging to execute without a platform like Swae.

We are enormously grateful to the Igarapé Institute who included us in this one-of-a-kind initiative.”

Since 2019, Swae has worked with global companies and organizations like Etihad Airways, Bosch, and Lifelabs, NGOs like Doctors without Borders (MSF Canada), as well as intergovernmental entities like The United Nations, and the Governments of Mexico and Chile.

We help our clients engage their people to surface unconventional ideas, to find out the possibilities of new innovative ideas, build pragmatic solutions collaboratively, and help them solve their most pressing challenges in a more organized, efficient, and inclusive way.

We have built a strong reputation around creating a safe and inclusive space for problem and solution generation driven by users, helping leaders to hear the truth, boost engagement, and find investable solutions, all while reducing bias in important strategic decisions.

If any of the topics above interest you, and you would like to see how our technology might help your organization achieve similar results to the UN and others, please reach out to set up an initial conversation. We would be delighted to show you how easy Swae is to implement, and to explore a pilot or use case for your organizations.