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…
Only 38% of Africa’s population used the internet in 2024. Infrastructure bottlenecks that keep costs high and speeds low is a key problem that most development practitioners rarely discuss. What can make the internet cheaper and faster: local Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). When traffic from Nairobi to Kampala routes through London before coming back, users […] The post Apply Now: $50,000 for I…
Healthcare providers are often involved in helping clients consider, choose, and adopt contraceptive methods. This includes new methods like DMPA-SC, the pre-packaged, single-use contraceptive that can be self-injected and is effective for three months, thereby reducing the return visits a user needs to make to the clinic. Satisfaction around self-injected DMPA-SC is very high once […] The post I…
When I read through the 2024 US Federal AI Use Case Inventory, I expected to find a showcase of responsible digital governance. Here was the world’s most powerful government, publishing a public database of every AI system its agencies operate, organized by risk level, rights impact, and deployment status. A model for transparency. An accountability […] The post USA: 91% AI Non-Compliance Rate. W…
Acute food insecurity rose for the sixth consecutive year in 2024, with more than 295 million people across 53 countries experiencing hunger. At the same time, substantial reductions in official development assistance and humanitarian aid are deepening food and nutrition crises further in 2025. The case for agricultural technology (AgriTech) innovation has never been stronger, […] The post Apply …
From the written word to the mobile phone, every major technology has reached people with strong social capital first. This is not a failure of the technology. It is a sociological constant. People who are well-connected and institutionally embedded always benefit from new tools first. However, public investment in technology cannot be neutral. It must […] The post India’s Digital Agriculture Mis…
