From the Bandung Conference to the Lagos Plan of Action, the Abuja Treaty, the ASEAN Community Vision, Arab regional frameworks, the Buenos Aires Plan of Action, CELAC initiatives, CARICOM integration, and the Sustainable Development Goals — the Global South has consistently advanced ambitious, foundational frameworks for sovereignty, integration, cooperation, and long-term development.
This Southern reality unfolds within a rich history of vision and collective action. Across Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, the Middle East, and their diasporas lie abundant sources of oral knowledge, indigenous experience, and inherent creative and scientific innovation — much of it lacking visibility, waiting in inertia.
Meanwhile, deeply interconnected systemic challenges — climate change, inequality, digital transformation, geopolitical shifts and conflict — interface an increasingly complex landscape. Knowledge production remains compartmentalized within specialized domains, without sustained dialogue across sectors or everyday realities.
The Global South has never lacked vision. What it has lacked is the connective tissue between vision and implementation.
Five structural constraints, one missing middle.
A gap persists between vision and implementation, shaped by structural constraints across many Southern state contexts:
Fragmentation
Across sectors — governance, economy, technology, environment, and education — effort is scattered where it should compound.
Knowledge–policy misalignment
Limited alignment between knowledge production and public policy; decision-making tied to externally driven technical assistance and financing frameworks.
Under-integrated knowledge systems
Local, indigenous, and experiential knowledge systems remain under-integrated — while colonial legacies and epistemic eurocentrism still shape research agendas and hierarchies.
Scaling challenges
Research and innovation struggle to scale into sustainable, system-wide impact — critique without pathways to application.
Misaligned incentives
Incentive systems across academia, policy, and funding environments pull in different directions.
The “missing middle”
Underdeveloped institutional interfaces between research and policy limit the systematic translation of knowledge into decision-making.
A next-generation platform for knowledge in motion.
A knowledge ecosystem requires structured collaboration across disciplines, regions, and sectors — especially with policymakers — to better inform public decisions in areas like public health, education, and environmental policy.
GPS rebuilds these connections: linking knowledge, policy, and practice across fields and contexts, and moving ideas from research into real-world solutions. It bridges the missing middle by creating pathways between ideas and implementation — and it calls for equitable partnerships, aligning locally grounded research to priorities defined by Global South states themselves.
These realities do not simply require new plans. They require a renewed approach for framing, connecting, mobilizing, and translating Southern knowledge into action. GPS places academic, local, indigenous, and experiential knowledge at the center — organizing action across interconnected domains and enabling a living ecosystem across sectors that have long operated in isolation.
See our approach →Knowledge → Policy → Impact
GPS starts from real-world situations and lived, observed, carefully analysed experience. Knowledge informs policy formulation; policy functions in tangible ways; ideas become action and quantifiable change.
Like a navigation system — form follows function.
Global
Interconnecting solution research to challenges across regions, disciplines, and systems.
Platform
Enabling coordination, collaboration, and collective action.
South
A space sharing history, experience, creativity, and knowledge — including its diasporas.
Like a navigation system, GPS helps actors locate themselves within evolving global knowledge systems, align priorities across institutions and regions, and chart pathways toward shared futures.
In honoring the spirit of navigation, GPS recognizes Gladys West, whose pioneering work contributed to modern satellite positioning — a reminder that transformative knowledge often emerges from communities and places too often overlooked.
Inspired by the Sankofa principle, GPS affirms that the future is shaped by drawing on the wisdom of the past in present action — connecting indigenous and endogenous knowledge systems, lived experience, and local realities with emerging technologies and global perspectives.
Simultaneously, GPS is —
A hub of research & knowledge institutions
A policy implementation platform
A leadership & training ecosystem
An innovating & accelerating partnership pivot
A global convening forum for dialogue
A strategic catalyst for Global South transformation
Together, these dimensions position GPS not merely as a forum for dialogue, but as an integrated ecosystem designed to connect knowledge, policy, innovation, and action — in ways that generate measurable, sustainable impact. Where GPS sits in the world