ICTworks

Internet access keeps expanding, but the gender gap has stopped closing. ITU data for 2025 shows 77% of men online against 71% of women, about 280 million more men than women connected. The gender parity score has sat at 0.92 since 2019, six years of growth with no movement toward parity. Meanwhile the groups working […] The post Apply Now: $100,000 for Feminist Tech Activism in LMICs appeared fi…

Recently, ICTWorks raised a valid alarm: voice-only interfaces are often failing small businesses in low- and middle-income countries. We’ve spent years at CLEAR Global documenting that the problem isn’t the interface, but the foundational data. Voice technology is currently built on a digital divide that favors a handful of dominant languages and excludes the linguistic […] The post Voice Isn’t …

India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Rules take full effect on 13 May 2027. If your program collects data from anyone in India, you have nine months, and your consent checkbox will not suffice. The sector read the November 2025 notification as GDPR arriving in South Asia. India Briefing described them as aligning India more closely […] The post India’s Data Law Is Stricter Than GDPR: Please P…

African startups raising between $100,000 and $1 million fell from 179 deals in the second half of 2025 to just 100 in the first half of 2026, a 44% drop in exactly the segment that funds first products. Early-stage founders are being squeezed hardest at the moment AI tooling is changing what a three-person team […] The post Apply Now: Google Africa Applied AI Lab for Founders appeared first on I…

Ask how ready Timor-Leste’s young people are for artificial intelligence and the honest answer splits in two. They use it more than almost any peer group in Southeast Asia. They can do less with it than almost any peer group in Southeast Asia. Both things are true, and the distance between them is the whole […] The post Timor-Leste Youth Are AI-Fluent and AI-Unready at the Same Time appeared firs…

Has the development community learned nothing from our failures with One Laptop Per Child? The data is undeniable: progress in closing the mobile internet gender gap has stalled, with 885 million women across low- and middle-income countries still unconnected. Women remain 14% less likely than men to use mobile internet, despite eight years of well-intentioned […] The post Smartphone Distribution…

Across low- and middle-income countries in Africa, 161 million women of reproductive age want to avoid a pregnancy, and roughly 32 million of them have an unmet demand for contraception. Clinic-based counseling has not closed that gap at the scale or cost required, and the first generation of digital health tools mostly delivered one-way SMS […] The post Apply Now: $500,000 for African AI-Enabled…

Africa has 50 data centers that Uptime Institute has physically inspected and certified as built to Tier III or Tier IV. Morocco holds 17 of them, more than three times the next country, and it is almost never the one anyone names first when the sector talks about African data centers. Sector coverage ranks the […] The post Wow! Morocco Leads Africa in Certified Data Center Construction appeared …

The most exciting federal AI language of 2026 is buried in a scoping services contract, and it has nothing to do with buying AI. The government contracting world has spent eighteen months covering the post-OMB M-25-22 wave of AI contract language as a burden. Gibson Dunn’s analysis of GSA’s draft AI clause is representative: new […] The post USTDA Wrote the AI RFP Clause the Rest of Government Sh…

Africa is home to 18% of the world’s people but holds less than 1% of global data centre capacity, and only about 40% of its population is online. That gap in compute, connectivity, and digital skills is what a new pan-African research call wants to close. $12 Million in Research Funding The Science Granting Councils […] The post Apply Now: $12 Million for Digital Technology Research in Africa ap…

A new study in the International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science surveyed 200 women micro-entrepreneurs in Bengaluru and reported that 32.5% of them are “actively using at least one AI-enabled tool” in their businesses. The tools, according to the paper, include KhataBook (a digital ledger), WhatsApp Business auto-replies, Canva, and Facebook’s “best […] The post We Have an A…

How many digital health conferences start with the same tired promise: “We just need to digitalize everything and health data quality will magically improve.” After reviewing PATH’s comprehensive assessment of primary health care data systems across Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria, I can tell you that this Silicon Valley-inspired narrative is dangerously wrong. The […] The post Your He…

When I first compiled the list of every African country’s national eHealth strategy or digital health policy back in 2020, the dominant instrument across the continent was a five-year national eHealth strategy. They were written to a WHO Global Observatory template, often expired, frequently undiscoverable, and almost never legally binding. Six years on, that picture […] The post Updated: Every A…

Starting October 1 2026, anyone using WhatsApp as a platform to reach their target audience will be charged by Meta for outbound messages. Until that date, it will have been free to do so within a 24-hour window opened by the user’s last message, meaning that as long as your chatbot (or human agent) was […] The post Meta Wants to Charge for WhatsApp Messages: Chatbot Builders Beware appeared firs…

Asia-Pacific is the most disaster-prone region in the world. The UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific projects that climate-induced disaster losses could near US$1 trillion annually, or 3 percent of regional GDP, under a 2°C warming scenario. Green technology is gaining traction across the region, but it is not scaling fast […] The post Apply Now: Google DeepMind AI for the …

Honest ICT4D case studies are the ones that admit which technology choices were forced on us by the people we were trying to serve. I was the technical lead at UN Women HQ on Hecho por Mujeres, Costa Rica’s national e-commerce marketplace for women entrepreneurs living in poverty. What follows is the practitioner-level account of […] The post How I Built an Open Source Digital Marketplace for Wom…

For 15 years, open source has functioned as something close to scripture in ICT4D. Principles for Digital Development enshrined it as Principle 6. Digital Public Goods Alliance built a global movement around it. UNICEF Innovation declared that it would only build open source in 2026 Donor procurement guidance treats “we’ll open source it” as proof […] The post Wow! Open Source Costs NGOs More Tha…

If you visit DEEP on the Wayback Machine, you will not find the AI-powered humanitarian analysis platform that UN OCHA, UNHCR, UNICEF, and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre had built for their secondary data review workflows around for nearly a decade. You will find this: “The DEEP was a trusted humanitarian analysis platform that fostered […] The post Please Stop Designing Humanitarian…

For three years, “AI for development” has been a conversation about possibility. Capability demonstrations. Pilot dashboards. Workshop slide decks. A thousand experiments in a thousand offices, each producing one good output, each one ending with the same question: what would it take to do this at scale, and to do it in a way the […] The post Time to Get Serious About AI in International Developm…

African AI startups captured barely 1 to 1.5% of global AI spending in 2025, even as AI pulled in close to half of all venture dollars worldwide. At the earliest stages the gap is wider still: in the second quarter of 2025, startups across the continent raised just $14 million in AI deals, about 0.02% […] The post Apply Now: $100,000 for African AI Startup Founders appeared first on ICTworks .