Introducing Suwali to the world
Our new software helps organizations supercharge their ability to deliver information and crowdsource community knowledge.
Our new software helps organizations supercharge their ability to deliver information and crowdsource community knowledge.
Today, at an intimate gathering on the sidelines of the 2026 Skoll World Forum in Oxford, England, we are officially announcing that Suwali — the chatbot public interest organizations have been waiting for — is open for business.
Visit suwali.io to sign up for a free trial or book a demo today.
With Suwali, organizations can share their reporting and research through ongoing, two-way dialogue with their audience. Suwali works in real time, in multiple languages, and on platforms people already use. And Suwali’s dashboard offers insights showing what people care about and what they need next.
As a 2024 Skoll Award honoree ourselves, we thought there was no better place to debut our new tool. Meedan’s work has been informed by focused research and thoughtful engagement with our partners, and it was built over 18 months of rigorous product design and engineering.
We built Suwali for leaders in journalism, public health, civic engagement, and human rights. Though we gave audiences a peek at what was to come in 2025, this is truly the moment we’ve all been working toward. Executive Director Dr. Dima Saber is on-site for the launch alongside Director of Strategic Partnerships Megan Marrelli, Director of Product Brian Fleming, Director of Research Dr. Scott Hale, and Research Scientist Terry Zhang.
“I've spent years watching communities navigate elections, health crises, and conflict with information systems that weren’t built for them. Suwali is our answer to that gap. After 18 months of building and listening, it is a profound relief, and a thrill, to finally see it in the hands of the people who truly need it,” Saber said.
In the process of developing Suwali, we worked hand in hand with a cohort of pilot partners from Egypt, India, Lebanon, and the United States. These groups tested the tool, shared feedback, and helped us generate plans for new iterations of the software that would better suit the needs of Meedan’s real-world media and civil society partners.
We’d like to thank our pilot partners Deep South Today, Epicenter NYC, The Healthy Indian Project, Al Manassa, Omgyno, and The Quint for their dedication to enhancing Suwali, alongside several key supporters, including Sida, Press Forward, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, the McNulty Foundation, the National Philanthropic Trust, and Battery Powered.
Read more in our Q&A with The Quint and our recent interview with Omgyno.
Forging connections across languages has always been a core commitment of Meedan’s work. And in an era where commercial AI products so often underserve users who don’t speak English, Suwali was built with linguistic diversity at its core. That’s why we’re launching in English, Spanish, French, and Hindi with support for Arabic and Portuguese on the way. As we move forward, Meedan is dedicating significant resources to research and development efforts that will help us ensure Suwali is built with Larger World input from the ground up.
Suwali draws on Meedan’s rich history as a technology nonprofit that helps people get informed, exercise their rights, and participate in democracy. For a decade, our flagship product Check supported our partners’ collaborative verification efforts and facilitated the exchange of data during crucial moments like elections and natural disasters.
Now, Suwali is rising to the challenges we’ve long known were coming. With careful attention to the creation of tooling that supports data ingestion, knowledge structuring, and conversational interfaces — all packaged together into a single, unified system — Meedan’s engineering team has constructed a product built to meet the urgent needs of today while establishing a foundation that’s flexible enough to evolve over time.
While Suwali’s journey is just beginning, we know that its impact will depend on the many partners and allies who deploy it to help bring more information to their communities. On that note, we invite you to try this tool for yourself!
Sign up for a free trial today to see what we’re so excited about.
For press inquiries, write to press@meedan.org.
