While most social networks are all about sharing cat videos and connecting with old school friends, a new peer-to-peer learning platform for government aims to bolster the critical skills for civil servants.
"Public servants are still often using 20th century tools in 19th century institutions," Robyn Scott, the co-Founder and CEO of Apolitical, told me.
Apolitical strives to help "public servants find and share the latest and best ideas, approaches and skills they need in order to tackle the hardest challenges facing society," she says. "Our mission is to accelerate the transformation of government, to make government work well for citizens everywhere."
Web-based with extensive resources, Apolitical was named one of Fast Company's most innovative companies in 2018. "Apolitical connects public servants and policymakers in different contexts to advance collaboration and idea sharing around some of the world’s most pressing issues, from the refugee crisis to climate change," it wrote. "The idea behind the platform is to help public servants break out of the silos that often keep them entrenched in policies that no longer work, and look instead to governments spearheading programs they’d like to emulate. If Hamburg, Germany, for instance, develops a successful community-based model for welcoming and housing refugees, couldn’t somewhere in Canada do the same?"
This was Scott and her co-founder's original thinking: to allow civil servants to share their success stories and project implementations where their peers can learn from them. Any public servant anywhere in the world, or in academia or the non-profits sector can submit a case study or opinion article, which the other members can access. "Apolitical unlocks the hive mind of government and its partners," she says. "We want to make it as easy to find the best approach to a policy problem as it is to book a hotel room for your holiday."
Apolitical turns this peer-to-peer content into engaging learning experiences, such as short field guides on topics ranging from using technology to engage citizens to applying behavioural science to policy.
"Often public servants don’t know what’s already been solved elsewhere," says Scott. So they end up poorly serving citizens and wasting tax payer money - at best reinventing the wheel, at worst investing in projects that others could have told them would fail."
She adds: "Public servants are also increasingly busy and overwhelmed. So we prioritise making learning bite-sized, simple and inspiring - learning you can use (and want to use!) on your commute or your lunch break. One of our members recently said that 'in an era of democratic depression, you are like prozac for depressed policymakers'."
Having launched the platform two years ago, Apolitical now has tens of thousands of vetted public servants and policymakers regularly using it "for inspiration, ideas and problem-solving". Its members come from 160 different countries and range from mayors and ministers to millennial digital innovators. "We regularly hear examples of public servants who’ve changed the way they work because of something they found or someone they met via Apolitical. It’s going really well, even in this time rife with examples of badly performing governments," she says.
Before starting Apolitical with her co-founder Lisa Witter, Scott spent a lot of time working in some of South Africa’s most violent prisons. She had co-founded an organization teaching coding and other income-generating skills to prisoners and ex-offenders. "Our work was innovative and very rewarding," she told me. "But it was also very frustrating. So many people end up in prison because of failures in policy - failures in health, education, social services and justice. I wanted to work on causes, not consequences."
Although she had never worked in government before, she "was excited about it because of its power to positively affect lives and the planet at scale. Government directly controls 40% of GDP and represents the world’s largest workforce of 200 million public sector workers. I was also excited about the power of technology, my background, to play a role in this change: government has barely been touched by the potential of tech. I teamed up with my co-founder, Lisa Witter, who has a background in government, to found Apolitical."
London-based Scott grew up in Botswana, went to high school in Zimbabwe, and lived and worked in South Africa. Her first book Twenty Chickens for a Saddlewas "a memoir about growing up in Botswana against the AIDS epidemic. Despite this tragic background, it’s also a positive story about a solid African democracy, a story not told often enough".
Apolitical recently closed a new round of investment from mission-driven investors in Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia. Its investors include Public, Europe’s first govtech fund, and it has received European Union innovation grant funding.
The network also features videos from experts like best-selling Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Baroness Martha Lane Fox (who founded the UK’s Government Digital Services) and South African political heavyweight Lindiwe Mazibuko, the former Parliamentary leader of South Africa's official opposition, the Democratic Alliance.
Having been an advisor to Apolitical in 2016, she says she was impressed as it is "the world’s first global peer-to-peer platform for government" and its partners. "I was particularly excited about the prospect of helping build a platform which would increase public leaders’ international benchmarking abilities by connecting them to the innovative policies and projects around the work which are finding success and sustainability," says Mazibuko, who is the executive director of the Apolitical Academy. Co-founded by Mazibuko, Scott, Lisa Witter and Swedish entrepreneur and philanthropist, Daniel Sachs, it’s the non-profit venture that offers annual, intensive 25-person fellowship programs over nine months to train people for a career in government as "the next generation of ethical public leaders around the globe," Mazibuko told me.
The academy is based in London and Johannesburg, and held its inaugural Southern Africa program in mid-2018.
"My personal inspiration for building this programme was the semester I spent as a resident fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics in 2015 - having graduated from the Kennedy School a semester prior," says the hugely respected Mazibuko, who was the first non-white person to lead the Democratic Alliance in South Africa's parliament.
She held the role from 2011 to 2014, and then resigned to study at Harvard University for a year.
"I was teaching a seminar called 'How to build a democracy: lessons from Southern Africa' and was able to invite the most extraordinary guest lecturers to participate in the programme: Governor Tito Mboweni flew in from Johannesburg, President Joyce Banda joined us from the Wilson Center in Washington D.C., and Tendai Biti, the former Finance Minister in Zimbabwe’s unity government came all the way from Harare to address our students over two days in Boston."
She says "the students found it incredibly inspiring and as a consequence of the participation of these seminal leaders, the class attracted a lot of African diaspora students who had been thinking about running for office in their home countries and didn’t know exactly how to go about pursuing this ambition. This is where the seeds for Apolitical Academy were planted".
Apolitical has attracted significant attention around the world. "Apolitical's accessible policy advice makes it a natural partner for driving the sustainability policy agenda exemplified by the global goals," said Jens Wandel, the former assistant secretary general of the UNDP, in a testimonial on its site.
This fits with Scott's mission to empower civil servants: "These are the people making policies that impact all of our lives. We’re helping to bring government into the 21st century, using the best of technology and design to equip public servants to tackle the challenges of today and prepare for the challenges of tomorrow."
