ICTworks

Nonprofits in the Global South are now 35% more capable of digitalizing than their Global North peers, according to NetHope’s 2024 Digital Nonprofit Ability assessment. The catch: capability does not equal capacity. Most mission-driven organizations still treat technology as overhead rather than infrastructure, and 58% of nonprofit leaders cite staffing and operational capacity, not funding […] T…

Part 3 on the sovereign AI trap. Part 1: Nvidia sales channel. Part 2: Small models and edge inference. The case for small language models running on local devices is technically sound and economically honest. It is also politically inert without an institutional layer to enforce it. A community health worker in Rwanda running a […] The post Twenty Finance Ministers Have Leverage. One Does Not. a…

Most digital health implementers I know can recite these headline statistics in their sleep. A projected global shortfall of 10 million health workers by 2030. An estimated 8.6 million deaths a year in 137 LMICs from inadequate access to quality care The pitch decks practically write themselves: AI is the force multiplier that saves global […] The post 5 Questions to Ask of Every Digital Health A…

Globally, 273 million children are out of school, and the gap is widening fastest in the lowest-income countries, where 33 percent of school-aged children are out of school, compared to 3 percent in high-income countries. School meals remain one of the most reliable interventions for boosting enrollment, attendance, and literacy, especially for girls. The USDA […] The post Apply Now with AI: $240…

Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1: Sovereign AI is a Nvidia sales channel.  The trap is real. The escape route is also real, and most strategy documents have not caught up to it. For most of the past three years, the implicit assumption in sovereign AI debates has been that meaningful AI capability […] The post Small Models and Smartphones Beat Sovereign AI GPU Clusters appeared first on ICTw…

In May, two researchers at the University of Southern California published a paper describing a tool I have wanted for fifteen years: a conversational AI agent that pulls thousands of fragmented federal and foundation grant portals into one place, reads your draft proposal, and surfaces the opportunities that fit. The authors report it cutting grant […] The post Built by User: $250,000 NGO Softwa…

Around 600 million Africans still live without electricity, and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for eight out of every ten people globally without access. Progress has stalled. The IEA estimates the continent receives less than one-third of the annual investment needed to reach universal access by 2030, and population growth keeps eating into the connections that do […] The post Apply Now: €400,000 f…

Part 1 of a three-part series on the sovereign AI trap. There is a version of digital sovereignty worth defending. Public Digital’s forthcoming book Digital Sovereignty: The Power to Decide defines it as an organization making deliberate, informed choices that build its digital future by design. That is a useful idea. It applies to a […] The post Sovereign AI Is a Nvidia Sales Channel Using Devel…

The global digital health community has a consensus diagnosis for community health worker (CHW) skepticism about AI: it’s a training problem. Fix the onboarding. Improve the interface. Run human-centered design workshops. Build trust through better UX. I want to offer a different diagnosis. CHWs who distrust AI tools aren’t failing to understand them. They are […] The post Community Health Worker…

Africa is home to more than 2,000 languages, yet only about 42 have any meaningful support in today’s large language models. A 2025 review found that across widely used systems, just three scripts — Latin, Arabic, and Ge’ez — are broadly covered, and an estimated 88% of African languages are classified as severely underrepresented or […] The post Apply Now: $250,000 for African Language AI Projec…

We have spent two years debating whether AI belongs in low- and middle-income country (LMIC) healthcare. That debate is over. AI is already running, whether we sanctioned it or not. Health workers paste patient symptoms into ChatGPT. WhatsApp chatbots triage pregnancy questions. Predictive models forecast outbreaks. The real question is whether we’re paying attention to […] The post Compute Reali…

India’s nursing education sector is rapidly adopting digital tools such as learning management systems, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), simulation platforms, and artificial intelligence–supported learning. However, the real measure of success lies not in adoption alone but in whether these tools meaningfully improve teaching, learning, and preparedness for clinical practice. Insights into …

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…