About the AI Literacy Lab
AI tools are already being used across the aid, development, humanitarian, and social impact sectors - for research, drafting, analysis, communications, and programme design. But most professionals are learning by trial and error, without structured support for understanding how these systems actually behave, where they fail, and what risks they carry.
The gap isn't enthusiasm - it's literacy
Research from the Humanitarian Leadership Academy and Digital Frontiers suggests that while over 70% of aid and development professionals now use AI regularly, fewer than 4% report expert-level understanding. Most existing AI training is either too technical, too generic, or too focused on adoption rather than critical judgment.
Who is this for?
You're using ChatGPT or similar tools but finding yourself spending as much time editing AI output as it would have taken to do the work yourself. You work in aid, development, philanthropy, or social impact. You don't need to be technical - you want to move past trial and error toward informed judgment about when and how AI is actually useful.
If you've never used any digital tools, you may want some foundational experimentation first. If you're already building with AI APIs, parts may feel basic - though the sector-specific framing and the focus on critical judgment may still be useful.
A different approach
The AI Literacy Lab is being developed as sector-specific, hands-on AI literacy training for people working in aid, development, philanthropy, and social impact. It is not a generic "AI at work" course. It is designed around the specific contexts, risks, and ethical considerations that matter in this sector - including bias in how communities are represented, hallucination risks in policy and research, and the gap between AI confidence and ground truth.
What makes this different
- Hands-on experimentation with a real AI model, not slides or videos
- Sector-specific examples drawn from aid, development, and social impact contexts
- Reusable cognitive patterns - extraction, critique, comparative analysis, synthesis - not one-off prompts
- Power-dynamics aware: who is represented, whose perspective is centred, and what's missing
- Workflows, not just skills - building repeatable processes for research, analysis, and programme work
- Designed for non-technical professionals who need informed judgment, not engineering skills
Planned curriculum
The full curriculum covers five progressive stages. The five modules in this preview are drawn from Stage 1.
Stage 1: Understanding AIin this preview
What AI does, where it fails, and what's at stake. Mental models, hallucination, bias, data sensitivity, and the human guiding the loop. Five interactive modules, available now.
Stage 2: AI-assisted workflowsplanned
Master six cognitive patterns. Tool landscape. Task decomposition. Structured prompting. Building repeatable workflows for your actual work.
Stage 3: AI for sector workplanned
Research and evidence. Programme design. Fundraising and donor engagement. MEL. Communications. Working within constraints.
Stage 4: AI-augmented workflowsplanned
Compose patterns into pipelines. Extraction workflows. Qualitative analysis. Prompt templates. Opportunity scanning. AI improving AI.
Stage 5: Workflow redesign - judgement, governance, and transformationplanned
AI context and power. Knowledge systems. Build-vs-buy decisions. Organisational implications. Power, equity, and the Global South lens.
What this preview is
The five modules available now are self-contained exercises from Stage 1. They use a real AI model (not scripted responses) so you can see these behaviours first-hand. They are designed to be useful on their own, but they represent a fraction of the planned curriculum. This is not a beta of a finished product - it's a way to explore whether this kind of training meets a real need in the sector.
Your feedback will help shape what comes next
If you complete the preview, please fill in the short feedback form at the end. It would be particularly helpful to know:
- Was this useful? What landed, and what didn't?
- Would you want a longer, deeper version for your team or organisation?
- What topics or scenarios are most relevant to your work?
- Would you want this in other languages?
Interested in collaborating?
- Commission it for your organisation, network, or programme
- Co-develop it as a training partner, instructional designer, or content collaborator
- Fund it to support development, testing, and open access
- Express interest in purchasing access to the full curriculum when it is ready
Get in touch
If any of the above sounds right - or you just want to share thoughts - get in touch.