About GlobalSouth.ai
The Global South’s evidence base for AI governance
GlobalSouth.ai exists to close one of the most dangerous gaps in the modern world:
global AI rules are being written without grounded evidence from the places where AI is deployed at scale.
Healthcare, welfare, credit, agriculture, education, and public services across the Global South are already being shaped by AI systems. Yet the real-world behavior, failures, constraints, and trade-offs of these systems are largely invisible in global AI governance debates.
We exist to make that reality visible, structured, and decision-ready.
The problem we are solving
Today’s global AI governance is shaped upstream in standard-setting bodies, research institutions, and regulatory forums. But evidence from the Global South usually appears downstream, only after systems fail in public services, welfare, credit, or healthcare.
This creates a structural asymmetry:
- Rules are designed without real deployment data
- Harms are discovered only after people are affected
- Contexts of scale, inequality, and resource constraints are missing from policy debates
As AI adoption accelerates across the Global South, this gap becomes dangerous. Rapid regulatory diffusion, increasing reliance on AI in public systems, and the risk of importing unsuitable rules create a narrow window for Global South voices to shape global AI norms.
What global AI governance is missing
AI governance today has two strong pillars:
-
Reality
AI systems deployed in the real world -
Policy
Global principles, norms, and regulations
What is missing is the layer that connects them.
We call this the evidence layer:
- Continuous, field-level documentation of how AI systems behave
- Structured records of failures, risks, and constraints
- Decision-ready translation of raw data into policy insight
- Comparable signals across countries, sectors, and contexts
Without this layer, most AI governance debates operate in abstraction rather than reality. :contentReference[oaicite:4]{index=4}
What GlobalSouth.ai is
GlobalSouth.ai is an upstream evidence infrastructure for AI governance in the Global South.
We collect field-level evidence from AI deployments across critical sectors including healthcare, education, agriculture, finance, public services, rural governance, and law, and translate that evidence into formats that policymakers, researchers, and institutions can use directly in global AI governance.
We are not an advocacy platform.
We are not a think tank.
We are an evidence institution.
How evidence changes governance
AI governance only improves when field reality is:
- Documented rigorously
- Translated clearly
- Absorbed early in policy and standards processes
This creates a chain of impact:
Field AI reality → Evidence generation → Policy-ready translation → Global standards & research → More realistic AI governance
This is how point-of-use insights reshape upstream decisions.
What we actually produce
GlobalSouth.ai generates three kinds of outputs:
1. Evidence Bites
Short, structured documentation of:
- Real-world AI incidents
- Regulatory mismatches
- Sustainability and infrastructure constraints
- Sector-specific deployment failures
2. Field Evidence & Insights
Through interviews with practitioners, policymakers, regulators, civil society, and affected communities, we generate:
- Operational constraints
- Risk manifestations
- Contextual trade-offs
- Cross-country comparisons
3. Capability Building
Workshops and training grounded in Global South realities, covering:
- AI fairness in practice
- AI sustainability and infrastructure
- Context-aware regulation
The platform
GlobalSouth.ai is designed as a knowledge-to-policy system.
It allows policymakers, researchers, and institutions to move from discovery to action through:
- Incident and case study repositories
- AI deployment trackers (by sector, scale, geography)
- Structured stakeholder interview archives
- Contextualized global AI regulation explainers
- Operational and infrastructure constraint analysis
- Learning and engagement modules
All built to make evidence searchable, comparable, and policy-usable.
Why this matters globally
Global AI frameworks increasingly recognize the need for grounded, diverse evidence. But inputs from the Global South remain thin. The Observatory fills this gap without becoming a regulator, ensuring that global governance reflects how AI actually operates in the world’s most populous and resource-constrained regions.
This is especially relevant to emerging global mechanisms such as the Global Digital Compact and international AI advisory processes.
Our vision
We are working toward a world where:
Evidence from the Global South is a default input to all major AI governance and standard-setting bodies.
A world where global AI rules are shaped by real operational constraints, not just theoretical models.
Who we work with
GlobalSouth.ai partners with:
- Policymakers and regulators
- Research institutions and think tanks
- Multilateral organizations
- Civil society and practitioner networks
Our goal is to ensure that decisions affecting billions of people are informed by the reality of how AI actually works in their lives.
GlobalSouth.ai
From field reality to policy-ready intelligence.
Get In Touch With Us
What We Do
Evidence-Led AI Risk & Fairness Research
We investigate real-world AI failures, dataset harms, and governance gaps across Global South contexts to build an evidence base for responsible AI deployment.
AI Governance, Policy & Regulatory Intelligence
We analyse global AI regulations through Global South operating realities, translating policy into actionable guidance for institutions, regulators, and practitioners.
AI Fairness Testing & Assurance (Emerging)
We are developing practical toolkits, audit checklists, and evaluation approaches to help organisations test and validate AI systems for fairness, risk, and real-world impact.