About Neith

Neith is an African start-up that provides digital infrastructure to help institutions

meaningfully evaluate large scale public inputs. Think about all the consultations,

commissions, working groups and advisory bodies set up to get input from the public and then consider what happens to all the inputs received? Institutions are struggling and, for the most part, failing to engage seriously with collective inputs, but then are surprised when implementation is met with almost persistent resistance and opposition. The disconnect between public input and final decisions comes at a high price, not only is trust and legitimacy eroded, but sustained resistance to decisions leads to implementation failures down the line. Neith provides a platform that uses AI to evaluate and structure public input at scale, giving institutions the capability to engage with large volumes of input in a way that supports greater trust and legitimacy.

Why does this matter?

On paper, we are committed to the idea that people should be part of the decisions that affect them. Institutions commit substantial resources to public consultations, but traditional approaches are failing. How do we know? Survey after survey confirms that, despite all the investment in consultation processes, public trust in institutions is in steady decline. Increasingly, processes are considered to lack credibility and are viewed as performative, box-ticking exercises. Where people are asked for comment, but then find that their input has made no difference at all, trust plummets and, over time, institutions lose legitimacy. What results is the current environment of low trust and low legitimacy in which decision makers face almost constant opposition to their decisions in forms that range from endless litigation, adversarial media campaigns and public backlash to the active blocking of projects , non-compliance or derailed strategies.

What is underdiagnosed is the relationship between poor quality participation and implementation failure. Institutions often fail to see how stakeholder resistance to implementation is connected to the quality of the participation process. Moving from performative to legitimate participation is a crucial first step in rebuilding trust and legitimacy. This requires that the loop between public input and decision outcomes is closed. What this looks like in practise is engaging seriously with the content of public submissions, surfacing the areas of agreement or disagreement and explaining why certain concerns were adopted or rejected. Without this, each round of consultation will only yield more distrust and greater levels of grievance.

If ever an area was ripe for innovation, this is it.

Traditional approaches to participatory decision making are clearly falling short. At the same time, we are facing increasingly complex challenges that no single person, party or institution can solve in isolation. Under these conditions, public participation is not only a democratic commitment, it becomes a practical necessity and the only way to incorporate multiple perspectives on a problem, surface areas of dissent, and build the cohesion that makes implementation easier.

Historically, this has been very difficult to achieve. Institutions collect thousands or

even hundreds of thousands of inputs from people with different experiences,

interests and values, but this has not produced coherent, collective decisions.

Instead, we get conflict, and decision paralysis. The big difference now is that we

have the technology to enable the evaluation public inputs at scale, while still

preserving the nuances of different positions, making reasoning transparent, linking public inputs with final decisions and supporting the kind of relationship between institutions and their stakeholders that rebuilding trust actually requires.

Neith was created to build digital infrastructure for participatory decision making. We work closely with institutions to understand participation challenges and provide a configurable platform that uses AI to support the processing and structuring of large volumes of collective inputs in environments where legitimacy, accountability and meaningful participation matters. Recognising that a municipality will have different needs to a government department or a large corporation, the Neith platform can be customised for a range of decision settings from policy development and legislative or regulatory review processes to community engagements, employee or stakeholder consultations and leadership decision support.

This is only the beginning…

In the minds of many, public trust in institutions has been irretrievably lost. But this

cannot be the last word. There are institutions, both public and private, committed to inclusive and deliberative decision-making, but currently lacking the capability to achieve this at scale. Neith is the first African company to provide AI-supported infrastructure to meet this need. We see beyond the current limitations and are committed to working with institutions that care about inclusion and the value of engaging people in the decisions that affect them.