Apurva.ai expands Apurva LENS into a platform for development ecosystem

Apurva.ai, an AI-enabled public-good digital infrastructure platform working with more than 50 global organisations, has announced a new platform model for Apurva LENS, expanding it from an organisation-level product into a platform designed to enable knowledge sharing and collaboration across the wider development ecosystem.

Apurva.ai is a unit of C4EC Foundation, co-founded by Nilekani Philanthropies to support change leaders working to address complex social challenges at speed, scale and sustainably.

Apurva LENS to enable cross-organisation learning

Apurva LENS is designed to help funders, governments, NGOs, and other development-sector organisations make sense of knowledge spread across research, evaluations, programme experience and conversations. The platform places community voices and lived experiences at the centre of this process, allowing those closest to a problem to help shape how it is understood and addressed.

Apurva.ai said LENS has so far helped surface more than half a million voices and perspectives from across the development ecosystem in the Global South.

Under the new platform model, multiple organisations within an ecosystem can learn from knowledge shared by others while retaining control over what remains private and what is made available more broadly. This is intended to allow learning generated in one part of an ecosystem to become useful elsewhere without losing its context or ownership.

The shift comes as organisations increasingly grapple with large and fragmented pools of information. Apurva.ai said the challenge is no longer simply accessing information as AI makes more knowledge available but making sense of it and turning it into actionable understanding.

The platform brings together research, evidence and organisational learning with community voices and lived experiences, enabling a bottom-up approach to understanding problems and designing solutions.

Platform being tested across development sectors

Apurva LENS is already being used or tested across different development contexts. SELCO Foundation initially used the platform to bring together archival information, everyday conversations and sector-focused material, enabling teams to query the knowledge base, identify patterns and synthesise insights. The collaboration has since expanded through the Platform for Collective Wisdom (PCW), an initiative enabled by Apurva.ai that connects community voices, practitioner perspectives and institutional knowledge across the development sector.

Resilience Action Network Africa (RANA) has used Apurva LENS to organise and synthesise community dialogues and research across Kenya, Uganda, Sierra Leone and South Africa, covering areas including climate resilience, health, livelihoods, food systems, gender, governance and financing. The work highlighted the importance of combining AI-assisted analysis with human judgment rooted in local realities, political economy and systems dynamics.

In Brazil, Museu da Pessoa, which has an archive of 20,000 life stories and around 11,000 hours of recorded material, used Apurva LENS to prototype a subset of voices around longevity. The exercise explored patterns and differences across individual life stories and the potential to turn large archives into accessible, living knowledge that can inform understanding across languages and geographies.

Rare's Fish Forever programme, which works with fishers, local leaders, governments, funders and NGOs across Central and South America, Africa and Asia-Pacific, is also using Apurva LENS to organise knowledge accumulated across reports, presentations, field notes, chats and informal conversations. The programme aims to build a living knowledge ecosystem in which new insights from communities can continually inform learning across the wider programme.

Aggrey Aluso, Executive Director, Resilience Action Network Africa, said the work with Apurva LENS had demonstrated the value of connecting community voices with research and systems knowledge. “AI can help us make those connections, but human judgment remains essential to understanding and acting on them,” Aluso said.

Dr Harish Hande, CEO, SELCO Foundation, said connecting community and practitioner knowledge across organisations and geographies could help development organisations build on existing learning rather than repeatedly starting from scratch.

Nandan Nilekani, Co-Founder and Chairman, Infosys and Chairman of EkStep Foundation, said AI could make intelligence useful at scale across different societal contexts.

“India has shown how open infrastructure can enable ecosystems whose impact can extend far beyond its borders,” Nilekani said. “Apurva.ai is bringing that thinking to knowledge—connecting research, organisational learning and community experience so that insights can travel across organisations and geographies.”

Anand Rajan, Co-Founder and Mission Leader, Apurva.ai, said the development sector does not lack knowledge but faces a challenge in turning dispersed knowledge into actionable understanding.