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Government & agencies
Ministry analysts, agency and regulator staff, national statistics teams. You'll make the numbers behind a decision hold up when someone senior pushes back on them.
A4A Academy · Programme 02 · Founding cohort
Public Policy Analytics with AI
A guided, part-time programme for early and mid-career people whose work will shape public decisions: government and agencies, development partners and NGOs, think tanks and research institutes, and analysts moving into policy from somewhere else. You'll learn to turn messy public data into evidence a decision-maker will act on, use AI without being fooled by it, and finish with a real policy brief.
Who it's for
Early and mid-career, and new graduates heading this way. You need a quantitative or analytical foundation, whether from a degree in economics, statistics, public health, the sciences, engineering or the social sciences, or from working with programme and administrative data. You don't need prior policy experience, and we won't teach code or basic statistics from scratch.
Ministry analysts, agency and regulator staff, national statistics teams. You'll make the numbers behind a decision hold up when someone senior pushes back on them.
Monitoring, evaluation and programme teams at donors, multilaterals and implementers. You'll be able to say what a programme changed, not only what it spent.
Policy researchers and advocacy analysts. You'll turn a good piece of research into something a decision-maker will read and act on.
Analysts, economists and new graduates coming from the private sector or straight from a degree. You'll learn how public decisions get made, and where evidence gets in.
How it works
A live, guided cohort of about ten weeks, part-time, online. You'll move through it with people doing similar work in other institutions, with senior professionals guiding you, and a brief to finish.
Your peers will come from ministries, donors and research bodies across the continent. In policy work, the room is half the value.
One-on-one sessions with senior people who have taken evidence into policy rooms and watched what happens to it.
African policy problems, and the data that exists for them: incomplete, late, and collected for another purpose entirely.
You'll finish with a policy brief on a real question: something you can put in front of a director, a donor or a hiring panel.
The programme
Each module will build on the last. By the end, you'll be the person in the room whose numbers people trust.
How public decisions get made, and the handful of moments where evidence can change one. Then the data you'll have to work with: administrative records, national statistics, survey and census data, and programme monitoring data. What each is good for, how it was collected in practice, and where it quietly breaks.
The judgment that will keep you and your institution safe. Baselines and counterfactuals, attribution against contribution, selection and survivorship, confounding, and honest uncertainty. How monitoring and evaluation gets designed so it can answer a question, not only report activity, and how to read an impact claim someone else has made.
You'll use AI to get through document loads no team has time for: synthesising literature, comparing legislation, coding open-ended responses, exploring a dataset, drafting. Then you'll use your new critical eye to catch it being confidently wrong, and handle the part that matters in public work: what you disclose, what you never put into a model, and who is accountable for the output.
Analysis that no one acts on is a hobby. You'll write the one-page brief, lay out options with their costs and trade-offs, say what the evidence can and can't support, and hold your position when the answer is inconvenient. You'll also get the political and institutional reality: who decides, who blocks, and what timing does to a good recommendation.
You'll take one real question end-to-end with a mentor: the data, the analysis, the caveats, the options, the recommendation. You'll finish with a brief you can show, and a defence of it you've already been challenged on.
One-on-one sessions and networking with senior professionals, from module one, peaking in your capstone.
Mentoring
Policy analysis is taught badly by textbooks because most of it is judgment about a specific institution on a specific day. Every cohort will include one-on-one sessions and networking with senior people who do this work.
What you leave with
A finished piece of work on a live question, with the analysis behind it and the caveats stated. Something a director, a donor or a panel will recognise.
You'll spot a shaky causal claim before it reaches a minister, and be straight about what your own numbers can and can't support.
You'll use AI to cover ground no team has time for, and know exactly where it can't be trusted in public work.
Recognition of what you've built, plus mentors and peers across the institutions you'll keep running into.
Next cohort
Tell us you'd like to join. We'll get in touch with dates and details and confirm your place. Tuition will then be due about three weeks before the cohort begins.
● Tuition USD $1,100 · ~10 weeks, part-time · scholarships available
Also from the Academy
The same craft, pointed at commercial work. For graduates and early-career professionals who want to get hired, win clients, or build something of their own. It runs the same length, costs the same, and includes the same mentoring.
Questions
No. The cohort is deliberately mixed: ministry and agency staff, development partners and NGOs, think tanks and researchers, and people moving into policy from the private sector or straight from a degree. Half of what you learn will come from the others in the room.
No. We don't teach programming or basic statistics from scratch. You need comfort with numbers and logic, from a quantitative or analytical background or from working with programme and administrative data. We'll build on that.
The craft is the same. The decisions are not. Business Analytics with AI is built around commercial work: getting hired, winning clients, building a venture. This one is built around public decisions, where the evidence bar is different, the data is worse, and the audience is a minister or a board, not a manager.
Yes, and it works better than sending one person: the team will come back with a shared way of working. Get in touch and we'll sort out dates and group arrangements.
Tuition is USD $1,100 for the full programme, with scholarships available so cost isn't a barrier to talented people. Once your place is confirmed, tuition will be due about three weeks before the cohort begins.
About 10 weeks, part-time, and no. It's a guided cohort with live mentoring: four taught modules, then your mentored capstone brief. It's built to fit around a full-time job.
You'll have a policy brief you can show, a certificate, and a network of mentors and peers across ministries, development partners and research institutes.
Same discipline, different arrangement. Here we teach it. If you'd rather we built the tool or ran the analysis for your institution, that's Evidence for Policy on the solutions side.