Every voice in policy,
heard and verified.
SHENGO is a structured, AI-assisted way for governments to consult the people their policies affect. A rural expert, a regional civil society group, a citizen with a phone: each gets a verified record that their voice was part of the decision.
Logos indicate organisations in early conversation with SHENGO. They do not imply a formal partnership or endorsement.
Submitted to the Climate Resilience consultation from Adama, with no travel to the capital.
In Ethiopian traditions, the shengo is the assembly where the community deliberates, and every voice has a verified place in the decision.
We built a platform around that idea: structured deliberation, relevant stakeholders included, made digital, scalable, and accountable across the continent.
Today, most people are left out of the policies that shape their lives.
Governments still consult through workshops and email chains: costly, geographically narrow, and impossible to audit. The people with the most at stake are the easiest to leave out.
Has the knowledge, not the plane ticket.
Consultations happen in Addis Ababa. A specialist three hundred kilometres away is excluded by cost and logistics, not by lack of insight.
Submits, then hears nothing back.
A regional civil society group sends written input and attends workshops, but never receives proof that its voice was actually considered.
Has a phone, but no door to knock on.
Most people have no channel at all to take part in a national consultation, even on policies that will define their daily lives.
No audit trail
Verbal and email submissions leave no public record of what was sent, considered or ignored.
Cost rations quality
In-person consultations are expensive, so governments consult when there is budget, not when policy needs it.
Compliance is manual
Donor safeguard frameworks require documented consultation that current processes cannot reliably produce.
Incentives misfire
Experts show up, yet contributions go unattributed and unverifiable.
One consultation, start to accountability.
Every SHENGO consultation follows the same verifiable path, from the moment a ministry opens it to the public record that closes it.
Open
A ministry publishes a structured consultation with clear categories, a deadline and invited stakeholders.
Submit
Experts, civil society and citizens respond in structured form. Each submission is timestamped and logged.
Synthesise
The AI layer groups submissions by theme and position, giving officers a briefing in hours, not weeks.
Decide
Decision makers work from the synthesis alongside every raw submission, with dissent kept visible.
Account
A public record shows who took part, what was incorporated and what was not. Compliance exports follow automatically.
Four parts. One auditable system.
SHENGO is not a survey tool. It is structured infrastructure that replaces the workshop and email model with a verifiable, scalable, AI-assisted process.
Structured submission engine
Ministries publish consultations with defined categories, deadlines and response formats. Every submission is timestamped, attributed and cryptographically logged.
- Response templates that reduce noise and improve analysis
- Multilingual by design, including Amharic and Afaan Oromoo
- Deadline management with automatic stakeholder reminders
Stakeholder verification
Civil society, experts and citizens register through a verified identity layer. Submissions carry institutional affiliation, with an anonymous option for citizens.
- Civil society verified against the civil society registry
- Expert profiles with affiliation and credentials
- Citizen portal with an optional anonymous route
AI synthesis layer
Submissions are clustered by theme, stakeholder type and position. Policy officers receive a structured summary that turns weeks of reading into hours.
- Independent bias audit by an academic partner
- Raw submissions always available beside the summary
- Minority and dissenting views flagged, never lost
Audit and transparency
Each consultation produces a public record: who was invited, who submitted, what was submitted and what was incorporated. Donor safeguard reporting follows from it.
- One-click safeguard and compliance export
- Public record verifiable by any stakeholder
- Expert contributions cited and attributed
Touch the platform, not a slideshow.
A preview of the working interface for each role. Figures shown are illustrative during the testing phase.
| Consultation | Ministry | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Climate Resilience Policy | Planning and Development | Open |
| Higher Education Reform | Education | In synthesis |
| Digital Accessibility in Services | Technology and Innovation | Open |
| Smallholder Irrigation Strategy | Agriculture | Draft |
Open consultation
Climate Resilience Policy. Three short structured questions, about four minutes.
Your protection
Submit anonymously, and still receive a private receipt that proves your voice was counted.
Your submission was logged on the public record. You can check, at any time, whether it was reflected in the final policy.
Submissions cluster around three priorities: reliable infrastructure in regional areas, clearer regulatory guidance for service providers, and accessibility standards for citizens with disabilities. Two dissenting positions on rollout pace are flagged below and preserved in full.
| Contributor | Type | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Regional ICT Association | Civil society | Logged |
| Verified domain expert | Independent expert | Cited |
| Anonymous citizen | Citizen | Logged |
Everyone in the policy circle, at the same table.
Each actor needs something different. SHENGO is designed so that the whole circle benefits when consultation is done well.
For government ministries and agencies
SHENGO turns consultation from a compliance burden into an intelligence asset. Ministries receive structured, synthesised input from verified stakeholders, ready for decision making.
Weeks of analysis become hours
AI synthesis clusters submissions by theme and position, so officers get a briefing rather than a data dump.
Compliance documentation, automatically
Each consultation produces audit ready records for donor safeguard frameworks, removing manual reporting.
Legitimacy you can demonstrate
An immutable audit trail lets ministries show genuine consultation, protecting decisions from challenge.
"This is exactly the kind of homegrown digital governance infrastructure the Digital Ethiopia 2030 mandate is supposed to deliver."
For bilateral and multilateral donors
SHENGO reduces a real operational risk in development programmes: undocumented or inadequate stakeholder consultation. Portfolios that require safeguard compliance can use it as their documentation layer.
Safeguard documentation by default
The audit trail is generated through the standard consultation workflow, not as a separate reporting task.
Real evidence for monitoring
Donors can verify that funded policy work involved genuine input, with timestamped, attributed records.
Built to scale across programmes
The architecture supports multi country deployment, so one engagement can cover several portfolios.
"Active portfolios carry consultation documentation requirements across many projects. A workflow that satisfies them automatically meets a real, current need."
For civil society organisations
SHENGO gives civil society something it has rarely had: a verified, public record that its policy input was received. Advocacy moves from hope to documented fact.
Verified participation records
Export participation directly for your own reporting, instead of reconstructing it after the fact.
No geographic barrier
Regional groups submit to national consultations without travelling to the capital, on a mobile first interface.
Accountability after the decision
The audit trail shows which submissions were reflected, creating a new accountability mechanism.
"We have taken part in consultations for years, but never had a verified record that our voice was actually heard. That is the structural change."
For citizens and independent experts
SHENGO opens consultation to people who never had access, and gives experts a reputational reason to contribute quality input rather than attend for a per diem.
An open, mobile first portal
Any citizen can submit to public consultations, in their language, with an anonymous option.
Citation and attribution for experts
Expert submissions are attributed, timestamped and citable. Contributions that inform decisions are flagged.
A profile that grows with you
A verified record of policy contributions builds professional standing in a way no workshop attendance can.
"The shengo principle is simple: every voice has a verified place in the decision. We are making that principle work at the scale of a country."
What happens after you press submit.
For a citizen, taking part should feel safe and worthwhile. Here is exactly what SHENGO does with your voice, in plain terms.
You choose how you appear
Submit with your name, or anonymously. Either way your response is recorded. Anonymous submissions are never linked back to your identity.
Your submission is logged
Once logged, your response is timestamped on an audit trail designed so nothing is silently edited or removed.
You can see if it mattered
When the policy is decided, the public record shows what was incorporated. You can check whether the themes you raised were reflected.
Just a verified place in the decision.
Your data. Your country. Your control.
SHENGO operates under a published Data Governance Charter. Sovereignty is handled by architecture, not by promise.
In-country data residency
By architecture: consultation PII will live on Ethiopian national infrastructure (EthioTelecom TeleCloud) in production. During the testing phase, only anonymised data is processed.
Architecture levelGovernment owns its data
Each ministry retains full ownership of its consultation data. Data is portable and exportable.
In the CharterIndependent oversight board
An independent board oversees data practices, conducts annual audits and publishes public accountability reports.
Third partyFour-tier access control
Administrators, ministry officers, verified stakeholders and public viewers each have strictly defined permissions.
Role basedDefined retention
Active records, closed records and public reports each have set retention periods with secure deletion protocols.
Published scheduleAnnual public audit
SHENGO undergoes an independent annual governance audit. Results are published, with any remediation timeline.
Full transparencyFrom Ethiopia, to fifty-five.
Ethiopia is the foundation. The continental pathway runs through existing African governance institutions, in honest, staged phases.
Anchor
Federal ministries, with CAFOR as civil society partner.
East Africa
An East Africa cluster, on an ECA facilitated pathway.
West and North
Regional entry points across language groups.
Continental
An open-source replication toolkit, published at month 60.
Built for Ethiopia. Designed for the continent.
Digital Ethiopia 2030 sets the national mandate. Agenda 2063 frames the continental vision. SHENGO is the civic infrastructure that serves both.
The national foundation
The national strategy names citizen centred e-governance as a core pillar. SHENGO is the structured consultation layer that makes that pillar real rather than aspirational.
Aspiration 3 and Aspiration 6
Good governance and people driven development need the same foundation: a way for citizens and civil society to take part in decisions at scale. That foundation is SHENGO.
Built in Africa, for Africa
Civic technology aligned with Smart Africa and the AU digital governance agenda, owned and operated on the continent.
SDG 16 and SDG 17
Strong institutions need participatory governance. Partnerships need multi stakeholder engagement infrastructure. SHENGO delivers both.
How institutions work with us.
SHENGO is in its testing phase, so these are engagement models rather than fixed prices. We shape each one with the partner.
Pilot deployment
A scoped consultation programme inside one or more ministries, with onboarding and support included.
- Ministry onboarding and staff training
- Structured consultations end to end
- Compliance ready audit exports
- In-country data residency
Portfolio licence
SHENGO as shared consultation infrastructure across the active portfolios in a country programme.
- Multi consultation, multi ministry coverage
- Safeguard and monitoring evidence by default
- Multi country ready architecture
- Priority support and reporting
Open-source toolkit
A replication toolkit so any AU member state can stand up its own structured consultation infrastructure.
- Open replication toolkit
- Deployment through AU institutions
- Shared methodology and templates
- Community of practice
Read the thinking behind the platform.
Methodology, evidence and the documents procurement teams ask for. More will be published as the testing phase progresses.
A regional consultation, start to record
How one structured consultation reached contributors beyond the capital, and what the public record showed at the end.
Read the case studyHow the AI synthesis is kept honest
The clustering approach, how raw submissions stay visible, and how an academic partner audits the synthesis for bias.
Read the methodologySHENGO for procurement teams
A single page that covers what SHENGO is, what it produces, and how it satisfies safeguard documentation requirements.
Download the one pagerWho is building this, and why.
"I grew up in a house and community where decisions are made collectively and earn their legitimacy. Most policy today loses that. We are putting it back, at the scale of a country."
SHENGO began with a simple observation: Ethiopia, and much of the continent, has no shared infrastructure for structured, auditable policy consultation. The knowledge exists, the people are willing, but there is no door for most of them to walk through.
We are building that door. Ethiopia first, continental by design, and rooted in a tradition of deliberation that long predates the technology.
Product and platform
Policy research
Institutional partnerships
Civil society and community
Build the infrastructure with us.
SHENGO is built through institutional collaboration. There is a path for every kind of partner.
Funding, cloud and infrastructure
The capital and technical infrastructure that makes SHENGO deployable at scale.
Implementation and training
Delivery on the ground: training staff, facilitating consultations and building local capacity.
Bias auditing and validation
Independent credibility: auditing the synthesis, researching outputs and publishing findings.
Co-hosted consultations
Co-designed consultations, joint publications and shared presentation to the wider community.
Express partnership interest
Tell us your organisation and the kind of partnership you have in mind. We respond within two working days.
Testing phase · onboarding partners now
Ready to make consultation accountable?
Whether you are a ministry, a donor, a civil society organisation or a researcher, there is a way to work with SHENGO.
Government
Explore a pilot in your ministry. We handle the technical setup, you focus on the policy.
Start a conversationDonors and partners
Use SHENGO as consultation infrastructure across your portfolio, with evidence by default.
Request a briefingResearch and civil society
Join the network. Verified participation records for your advocacy and publications.
Join the network