ICTworks

The conventional wisdom about small and medium enterprises in developing countries sounds reasonable enough: build more fiber optic cables, expand mobile coverage, launch digital literacy campaigns, and eventually SMEs will adopt technology. I’ve watched this supply-side playbook unfold across sub-Saharan Africa for years, with mixed results at best. But new research from Ethiopia’s Amhara region…

The WHO Mental Health Atlas 2024 counts a median of 1.1 to 2.4 specialized mental health workers per 100,000 people in low-income and lower-middle-income countries. High-income countries report 67.2, and spend US$65.89 per person against under a dollar. People in that gap type their problems into chatbots. In a June 2025 study of roughly 4.5 […] The post Apply Now: $5 Million to Test If AI Chatbo…

Humanitarian procurement is good at buying things that stay bought. A water tank is the same water tank the day after you sign for it. An algorithmic system is not, and that one difference breaks the current purchasing process. The reflexive answer to AI risk in aid work has been to write more guidance. We […] The post Humanitarian Procurement Was Built to Buy Trucks, Not AI Software appeared fir…

Billions in new philanthropic AI wealth are heading toward international development. I wanted to know what the frontier AI models had to say about digital health absorbing that money. I wrote a test and handed the identical prompt to OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini: you are the chief investment officer of a new […] The post I Gave Frontier AI Models $1 Billion for Digital H…

The ICT4D community obsesses over mobile coverage maps while completely missing what matters for digital inclusion. We celebrate when another country hits 90% mobile broadband coverage, congratulate ourselves when operators roll out 4G to rural areas, and fund endless initiatives to get smartphones into more hands. Meanwhile, the data screaming at us from the ground […] The post Unlimited Home Br…

More new charitable wealth has been created in the last two years than the entire Gates Foundation endowment. Most of the international development sector is not organized to receive any of it. That is a solvable problem, and some people have already solved parts of it. Sign Up Now for more international development funding analysis […] The post A Tsunami of AI Philanthropy Money Is Coming. Are Y…

African startups raised about $1.44 billion in the first half of 2026, but the small cheques that start companies are disappearing. Rounds below $500,000 made up just 19% of deals, down from 52% in H1 2021, and only 190 ventures raised more than $100,000, the lowest tally since at least 2021. Disclosed grants are thinning […] The post Apply Now: £85,000 for African Engineering Innovation appeared…

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…