The Latest
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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 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...
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...
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....
