AI for Good at Scale: The Community-Led Impact Flywheel
Interlai Foundation
Session 571
From Local Insight to Scalable Impact: A startup-inspired framework for scaling AI in social impact
Interlai Foundation is a tech nonprofit that partners with local organisations to co-design and deploy AI tools that expand human capacity and strengthen the systems communities rely on.
One of the hardest challenges in social impact is scale - how to move from isolated interventions to systems that continuously improve and expand impact.
Interlai addresses this by adapting disciplined product design principles from the startup world, including responsible experimentation, user-centered design, and iterative learning and applying them to social systems. This approach forms the basis of the Community-Led Impact Flywheel: a framework that turns individual interventions into compounding systems of impact over time.
This interactive session introduces the Flywheel in practice through a live case study: the Interlai Teaching Assistant, a WhatsApp-based tool that returns hours each week to teachers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda. Participants will explore how local expertise, human-centered design, and iterative learning combine to unlock teacher capacity and open new pathways into STEM.
Attendees will leave with a practical framework they can apply to their own work, and an invitation to help shape where the Flywheel goes next.
Jay leads Interlai’s technical vision, ensuring Interlai delivers responsible and scalable tech tools for frontline organizations. She brings deep technical expertise in distributed systems and applied AI. Prior to Interlai, Jay held software engineering roles at Citi, Meta and Amazon. She is also a former professional athlete.
Computer Science — Columbia University
MSc Software Engineering — EPITA School of Engineering, France
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Lucinda is a social impact strategist with nine years of experience working with global organizations, including the Clooney Foundation for Justice and CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. Having seen firsthand how valuable time and insight are lost to repetitive tasks, delayed feedback, and fragmented processes, Lucinda co-founded Interlai to put data to work where it matters most.
MA Political Studies — University of the Witwatersrand
MA Intercultural Management (summa cum laude) — Université de Bourgogne, France
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C4. Capacity building
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C7. ICT applications: benefits in all aspects of life — E-learning
C7. ICT Applications: E-learning. The Interlai Teaching Assistant demonstrates how ICT applications can extend quality education in low-resource settings without requiring new infrastructure. By delivering AI-powered grading, feedback, and learner analytics over WhatsApp, a platform already embedded in teachers' and students' daily lives, the tool meets the C7 principle of using ICTs to make learning more inclusive, accessible, and responsive. It shows how e-learning can move beyond content delivery to actively support the educators who hold education systems together.
C4. Capacity Building. At its core, the session is about human capacity. Across Interlai's partner schools teachers lose 10–12 hours each week to manual grading time that could otherwise go to instruction, mentorship, and identifying students at risk of dropping out. By returning that time, the Teaching Assistant builds the capacity of the people education systems depend on most.
The Community-Led Impact Flywheel extends this further: local partners are equipped not just to use AI tools, but to co-design, evaluate, and adapt them, strengthening institutional and community capacity to shape technology on their own terms.
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Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
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Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
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Goal 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
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Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries
- Objective 1: Close all digital divides and accelerate progress across the Sustainable Development Goals
- Objective 2: Expand inclusion in and benefits from the digital economy for all