Courses & Fellowships


COMPASS (Capacity-Oriented Mentorship for Public Administrators on AI Safety & Strategy) is the first-of-its-kind AI governance fellowship built specifically for active civil servants in the Global South, people who already have institutional power and can influence AI policy from day one of the program.


Artificial intelligence is reshaping how governments work. From automated public service delivery to algorithmic border controls, from national AI strategies to international treaty negotiations, the decisions being made right now will define governance norms for decades. The problem is that the people making those decisions in the Global South are largely doing so without structured training, mentorship, or peer networks.

Most existing AI governance fellowships target students, researchers, or private sector professionals. They are excellent programs. But they share a critical limitation: their graduates still need to find jobs, build credibility, and navigate bureaucracies before they can actually move policy. That process takes years, years the world does not have.

COMPASS takes a fundamentally different approach. It targets people who are already inside government such as civil servants, regulators, and public sector officials across Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, and gives them the technical fluency, governance frameworks, and peer network they need to act immediately on what they learn.

We believe every government has a role to play in avoiding and managing existential risk from advanced AI. Right now, that job falls to a handful of countries. The Global South has just as much at stake, and needs the same capacity to manage that risk, not be left out of it.

COMPASS: AI X-Risk Fellowship is a focused track developed as part of the broader COMPASS (Capacity-Oriented Mentorship for Public Administrators on AI Safety & Strategy) initiative under development, a proposed fellowship for civil servants that we are designing as a capstone project under the Successif AI Policy Strategy Fellowship. While the broader COMPASS initiative aims to build government capacity on AI safety and governance, this AI x-risk track focuses specifically on catastrophic and existential risks from frontier AI. 

It trains sitting civil servants and public administrators who are already positioned to contribute to policy development, institutional preparedness, and strategic decision-making, rather than students and early-career professionals who are still years away from holding roles with direct influence over government policy.

Fellows spend 8 weeks working through what AI x-risk actually is, what general purpose AI (GPAI) systems are and why their capability trajectory matters, and what a government can concretely do about it, monitoring, red lines, incident response, procurement guardrails, and how to hold your ground in multilateral negotiations. Each fellow leaves with a real risk management plan for their own country, built and presented during a capstone week, and joins an alumni network that keeps public administrators across countries connected and coordinating long after the program ends.

We plan to launch these fellowships following successful fundraising. For more information or to support these initiatives, please contact us at icgheadoffice@gmail.com