Building Institutional Capacity through AI

Introducing the OASIS Toolkit

In 2014, the World Bank reported that 31% of the reports they put online had “never been downloaded, ever, by anyone." International development organisations publish tens of thousands of documents every year, and most practitioners only have time to read a tiny fraction of what's relevant to their work. This means useful evidence gets missed, especially at the present time when most agencies are making cuts to their teams and resourcing. At the same time, agencies adopting artificial intelligence (AI) are realizing huge gains in speed around different processes but are failing to understand the implications of this for everyday workflow without clear version control and communications. At the moment, the use of AI is predominantly being driven by the incentives of individuals looking to hack existing processes, but we are still far away from understanding how to deploy it for systems strengthening for example.

To explore how AI might help transform the capacity of people and institutions working in development, IDIA is collaborating with an international team at the Frontier Technologies Hub, an award-winning initiative that has been helping the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) fund, test and scale the use of emerging technology in its response to contemporary problems around the world. The intention is to co-create and curate a portfolio of open-source, AI-enabled solutions that can fundamentally reshape the practice and efficacy of development by reconfiguring how policymakers and practitioners design and implement their work.

This resource – known as the OASIS Toolkit – is a purpose-built, assured repository or infrastructure of AI tools, with a sandbox environment where users are able to link it to the reports and data of their own institutions and use the open-source foundation to build something customized to their needs. With the intention to create a wrap-around OASIS Community of Practice for users to share their learning around AI tool development, OASIS has the potential to become a pivotal resource and influence in helping the global development community make a step-change in its efficiency and impact.

Four tools are current included in the toolkit, with more tools are on the way through actors either commissioning a tool for potential development and/or submitting a tool for review and potential inclusion in the OASIS Toolkit so others can find it, use it and learn from it. In the meantime, members of the IDIA ecosystem are scrutinising what they are doing manually to identify if/how AI could do it or add value, which is further helping to articulate the “OASIS investment space” that makes sense for each agency.

If you are interested in exploring collaboration with IDIA and the Frontier Technologies Hub on the OASIS Toolkit, please contact us below.