ICTworks

Cervical cancer kills roughly 350,000 women every year, and about 90% of those deaths happen in low- and middle-income countries. The disease is almost entirely preventable, yet the average screening coverage in sub-Saharan Africa is around 4%, and most screening still relies on a low-performance test. The WHO’s target for elimination by 2030 requires reaching […] The post Apply Now: $700,000 for…

Development practitioners are celebrating voice interfaces as the ultimate accessibility solution. Yet research from Kenya’s small business sector reveals this assumption is fundamentally wrong. What happens when voice meets real-world business contexts in Africa? New research on Dukawalla exposes three critical challenges when a voice-enabled business assistant deployed across small and medium e…

For years, we explored the digital regulatory environment in an African country by: Opening fifteen browser tabs, with three of them showing 404 errors, Downloaded PDFs from three different ministry websites Asked a colleague in Nairobi or Lagos for the law nobody can find online Stitched together a picture that’s already out of date by the […] The post New Africa Tech Policy Insights on Nigeria,…

The Philippines ranks third globally in tuberculosis burden, with roughly 100 Filipinos dying from TB daily. It also has the fastest-growing HIV epidemic in the Western Pacific. These twin crises strain a health system contending with decentralized governance, supply chain disruptions, and geographic isolation across 7,000 islands. The Opportunity The U.S. Department of State is […] The post Appl…

The 2014 Ebola crisis cost Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone $2.2 billion in lost economic growth. When SARS spread through Asia in 2003, affected countries lost $40 billion in GDP. COVID-19 shut down the world. Early intervention is not just a health strategy; it is the only cost-effective one. Containment, surveillance, and fast response are […] The post Apply Now: $290 Million for Infectious D…

Have we been approaching the gender digital divide all wrong? For years, development practitioners have obsessed over access, affordability, and skills training while missing the most crucial insight about women’s digital behavior: they’re not passive victims of digital exclusion. Sign Up Now for more digital divide insights  Women are sophisticated strategists navigating complex socio-technical …

I’ve lost count of how many ICT4D Fail Festival entries follow the same script: “Our app had cutting-edge features, our platform was technically robust, our team was experienced. Yet somehow the project still failed.” The usual suspects get blamed: poor infrastructure, limited digital literacy, inadequate funding. New research from Rhodes University suggests we’re fundamentally misdiagnosing […] …

About 2.2 billion people remain offline in 2025, and 96 percent of them live in low- and middle-income countries. Even among those who are connected, mobile broadband remains unaffordable in roughly 60 percent of low- and middle-income countries. The headline numbers on connectivity keep improving. The quality gap underneath them is getting harder to ignore. […] The post Apply Now: $500,000 for I…

Zambia is about to make a spectacular miscalculation. While researchers and development practitioners celebrate the potential of linking the country’s digital identity system (INRIS) with tax administration to boost revenue collection, they’re ignoring a fundamental truth: the fastest way to kill digital ID adoption is to make people fear that registration equals automatic tax surveillance. […] T…

Donor meetings often conclude that electronic medical records are too complex for low-resource settings. The conventional wisdom in our sector holds that digital health in LMICs should mean SMS reminders and WhatsApp chatbots, not sophisticated data systems requiring infrastructure investment. We’re told to keep solutions simple, infrastructure-light, appropriate to context. The data from Malawi’…

The AI divide is widening, not closing. As of June 2025, high-income countries held 77% of global colocation data center capacity, while low-income countries held less than 0.1%. Microsoft found generative AI adoption in the Global North is now roughly double that of the Global South, and the gap grew through 2025. $150,000 Artificial Intelligence […] The post Apply Now: $150,000 Artificial Intel…

The development sector is proud of what it has built. DHIS2 runs national health information systems in more than 80 countries. CommCare supports community health workers at scale. Safaricom-backed M-Tiba distributed insurance benefits and government health subsidies to millions of Kenyans. These are real achievements. They are also real targets. In October 2025, a threat […] The post We Built Di…

The digital development community keeps debating the promise versus peril of biometric digital ID systems across Africa. The conventional wisdom goes something like this: African governments rush headlong into biometric technology without proper safeguards, driven by donor pressure and vendor promises. The reality, based on the most comprehensive study to date across ten African countries, […] Th…

About 1 billion children live in countries facing high climate and environmental risk, and 466 million children now live in areas experiencing at least twice as many extreme heat days as their grandparents did in the 1960s. Yet children remain largely absent from the design of the climate technologies meant to protect them. UNICEF Ventures […] The post Apply Now: $100,000 UNICEF Funding for Clima…

We are building the 2026 ICT4D Conference agenda to bring you the very best of what the community has to offer in Nairobi this May. This year’s agenda has 85+ sessions, selected from a pool of over 475 sessions submitted through our abstract review process. When we stepped back to look at what we’d assembled, […] The post Please Lead a Roundtable Discussion at the ICT4D Conference appeared first …

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, women run an estimated 58% of informal businesses. They’re the backbone of local food systems, household economies, and community resilience. Yet when development organisations design coaching and advisory programmes for this group, they routinely rely on tools that women can’t use: smartphone apps, online platforms, WhatsApp groups. Millions of women-led businesses go …

Over 2 billion people remain offline, roughly a quarter of the world’s population. Most live in rural, remote, or low-income communities where commercial ISPs have little incentive to build and where governments have struggled to reach. We need community-centered connectivity: solutions built for, with, or by the communities that will use and maintain them. $200,000 […] The post Apply Now: $200,0…

Mobile money is the one unambiguous success story in digital development. In 2024, 2.1 billion registered accounts processed 108 billion transactions worth $1.68 trillion, a 20% jump in transaction volume year-on-year. Sub-Saharan Africa holds over one billion of those accounts. For a field that endlessly debates whether its pilots ever scale, mobile money is the […] The post 3 Reasons African Mo…

We are digital development practitioners in international development. Where does that role exist in domestic nonprofits working in the USA? A fascinating new research study by Lauren Chambers, a PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley, identifies four patterns of professional practice among “advocacy technologists” working in US civil society organizations. Every single pattern will sound remarkably […] Th…

Global generosity is under pressure. In 2024, only 33% of adults worldwide reported donating money to charity, down four points from the previous year, with financial donations declining by 10 points or more in 19 countries. Meanwhile, just 5% of individually donated dollars from high-income countries reach international causes, even as global health and poverty […] The post Apply Now: $150,000 f…