ICTworks

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 have ethical AI frameworks, codes of conduct, assurance toolkits, and decision trees. Maybe too many responsible AI guidelines to follow as it is.

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 foundation, a donor has given you $1 billion for digital health in low- and middle-income countries, and they want it deployed fast.

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 tells a completely different story about meaningful Internet connectivity. The development sector has been measuring the wrong thing.

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 Size of the Wave Run the arithmetic as a thought experiment.

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 too. Equity-free support is worth the application time.

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 on that gap are running out of money.

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 realities of the four billion people who speak the rest.

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 with global privacy norms. The Press Information Bureau called the framework citizen-centred.

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 can ship.

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 story. UNESCO’s 2025 AI Readiness Assessment for Timor-Leste, produced with Catalpa International, reports that 98% of survey respondents had heard of AI and 55% used it daily.