Strengthening village governance and democracy by reducing systemic complexity — enabling citizens (especially the most marginalized) to articulate demands; supporting Panchayat leaders to navigate complex governance processes, and improving transparency and accountability.
Better citizen services start with better government decisions. Decision Aids helps bureaucrats and policymakers ask questions, surface insights, and track what matters — in plain language, and on their own infrastructure.
We bridge rigorous methods with deep contextual understanding.
Building algorithms that help the most marginalized requires knowledge that lives in different places. Academic researchers bring the rigor to design methods that work. Grassroots organizations bring the contextual understanding of how systems function and which levers will actually move them. Governments bring the reach to act across an entire population. Transformative, scalable solutions come from bridging these worlds — and that bridging is the work ASCL is built to do.
Lasting change for the world's poorest comes from the systems around them — courts, clinics, schools, local governments. More than 95% of what is spent serving the poor flows through these systems: from their own governments, from their own pockets, from local institutions.
A small improvement there compounds in ways no external program can match. So our work is to help these systems do what they already do, better.
Algorithms are transformative, but to truly change systems, algorithms need to augment the people inside them - not replace them. That can mean helping a teacher understand where her students are stuck, a bureaucrat track why a vaccine hasn’t been delivered, or a villager follow where her local government is spending.
Taking inspiration from the MIT Bikeshop, we believe that AI should serve as bicycles for the mind — extending what people can do, never replacing them.
ASC Lab is non-profit.
Donations fund the launch of new projects — and only the launch. Each project is designed to be carried forward by the system it serves, so philanthropic dollars do the early work and public systems do the long work.
We estimate $2.5–3 million to pilot, evaluate, and scale the two projects above. We are raising a first round of $200,000–300,000 from seed funders to launch them. The hardest preparatory work is already done. Partners are in place, government MoUs are signed, and each project is ready to begin the moment the funding lands.
Once early results are in, we will raise the remainder from institutional donors. Over time, the goal is for each project to be carried forward by the government or institution it serves.
The earliest dollars are the ones that move the most: a few hundred thousand now unlocks the institutional round, and that round unlocks the systems that ultimately sustain the work.
