Mission and Impact
Mission
CollatEd is a data-driven development and diplomacy NGO, the first that uses foreign policy as a means of pedagogy to propel the Sustainable Development Goals and reform traditional diplomacy objectives. CollatEd assists world ministries to find practical policy applications of academic knowledge, all while strengthening research-based input to policymaking and furthering strategic, data-driven governance structures in developing nations. CollatEd Lab fosters sustainability and political capacity building through operating as a policy consulting and strategic international-development NGO in order to empower governments along with multi-sectoral partners to more effectively respond to issues at the international, national, and regional levels. Moreover, CollatEd Lab works with Ministries of Education in order to facilitate the inaugural SDG Youth Action Festivals worldwide in partnership with the UN SDG Action Campaign.
PolicyMaking Process
In the age of open innovation, CollatEd has decided to decentralize this knowledge revolution via a two-prong approach.
First, CollatEd works closely with academic institutions in order to establish centralized, SDG think tanks on university campuses to serve as a sustainable research hub for fellow researchers. Second, CollatEd works with global organizations, UN agencies, and policymakers to support CollatEd’s second international research hub, the iWorld Policy Lab. CollatEd then partners with UN Directors, Ministers/Government, and renowned academic experts, who cross-verify the policy outcomes of researchers. Challenge contributors, Ministries, containing first-hand knowledge of the issue, are able to collaborate with researchers in order to improve capacity-building solutions in the Policy Lab which inform the work of the United Nations, Foreign Embassies, governments, and higher-learning institutions' labs and think tanks.
Core Product: CollatEd Challenges™
Civil society, policymakers, and industry professionals from a variety of fields related to global problems are invited to create challenges based on their area of social impact to inform federal priorities in policymaking . An example of a challenge headline (Full submission form see Appendix): Improving water quality in Southeast Asia through the regulation of a new filter product. (Global Health, Water quality, Technology) || Associated disciplines: Engineering; quantitative research and data analysis; environmental chemistry. CollatEd writes its own software in a DIY format that automatically regroups and recommends ideas in its database in the areas of interest to accelerate the delivery of systemic solutions that enable equitable, relevant, impactful recommendations in contribution to the SDG’s. The product in the development process includes:
iWorld
A sub-platform featuring our work on education policy and policy-oriented contributor submissions, with the goal of forming the world’s largest youth-driven policy network. By responding to policy and simulating the impact, either through ideas crossed over from Challenges, students form a productive dialogue that becomes valuable feedback for centralized decision-making bodies.
HUBS for DIY
Once students complete their Innovator Profile and select a Challenge, they join a team automatically selected based on matching of profiles. The chat space is connected to a desktop idea-design toolbox to inspire their projects. The desktop supports an experimental mode of music-remixing-inspired innovation. It takes multidimensional features of existing ideas initialized to examples of innovation.
Partnership Functions, Contributions of Civil Society, and Combined Impact
CollatEd Lab’s unique model of targeting simultaneous issues rooted in policy and education has resulted in the implementation of solution crowdsourcing. The strategy of crowdsourcing reflects a global education, corruption and poverty elimination, as well as the formation of a cultural-change agent that leverages business, government, nonprofit, and academic/research platforms to enhance the evolution of inclusive political and economic structures.
Global Impact
CollatEd’s advancement of the Right to Innovate, in turn, has a systemic impact on developing societies and economies. The Challenges™ is designed for the final purpose of monitoring research benefitting the UNESCO, World Bank, UNDP, Ministerial, NGO, and University education accessibility initiatives. More than the universal access of digital materials, we seek an immediate idea-to-impact transference so that academia-government partnerships are strengthened in vulnerable nations lacking the infrastructure for evidence-based policymaking. We foresee a reduction of labor management abuse with heightened innovative power. Instead of existing employers providing upskilling programs, we can have a system driven by young people and their say on what tomorrow promises.
