ICTworks

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...