MEFMI: AI-Powered Knowledge Platform
Overview
MEFMI, the Macroeconomic and Financial Management Institute of Eastern and Southern Africa, has built the capacity of central banks and finance ministries across 14 member countries since 1994. Its most valuable asset is knowledge: decades of practitioner guides, manuals, bulletins, and curricula. That is exactly what a conventional website hides best.
The brief was unusually clear: MEFMI did not want a cosmetic refresh, it wanted to become an AI-enabled, stakeholder-centric knowledge platform, and it weighted a demonstrated AI concept above price, design, and team. So we did not hand over static images of a feature. We built one that works in the browser. An Ask MEFMI search sits above the fold, streaming a grounded, cited answer with expandable source cards and follow-up questions. On landing it self-demonstrates, then hands control to the visitor the moment they interact.
We grounded everything in MEFMI’s real world: their real navigation, their real programme taxonomy, their real publication types, and a palette sampled directly from their logo. The result reads as MEFMI sharpened, not a template wearing their colors, with live language switching, a document-to-summary tool, and a filterable impact dashboard that shows the regional footprint rather than stating it.
MEFMI’s existing site led with a dated rotating slider and buried the publications, the very material practitioners come for. The audience spans many sovereign states and working languages, and includes central banks, so trust and data handling could not be an afterthought.
- Knowledge that existed but could not be found, hidden beneath a carousel
- A single homepage expected to serve practitioners, member institutions, and programme applicants at once
- Multiple working languages across many sovereign member states
- An evaluation that scored a demonstrated AI concept above price, design, and team
- A central-bank audience for whom accuracy, citations, accessibility, and data sovereignty are requirements
We treated the homepage as a product, not a page, and built it as a real, interactive prototype anchored by a live AI layer.
- An Ask MEFMI cited search above the fold, streaming grounded answers with expandable source cards and follow-up questions
- A multilingual virtual assistant that routes people to the right programme or publication
- Live language switching across the institute’s working languages
- Document-to-summary that turns a 60-page manual into a one-minute triage
- A filterable analytics and impact dashboard driven by member-country and topic filters
- A publications repository reframed as a searchable destination rather than a buried carousel
- WCAG 2.1 AA contrast, strengthened focus states, a print-safe dashboard, and a reduced-motion path
- Brand modernization into a light, confident system led by MEFMI green, with a data-sovereignty story addressed head-on
See the Design in Action
Explore the full design concept and see how we approached solving the challenges outlined above.
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