ICTworks

Honest ICT4D case studies are the ones that admit which technology choices were forced on us by the people we were trying to serve. I was the technical lead at UN Women HQ on Hecho por Mujeres, Costa Rica’s national e-commerce marketplace for women entrepreneurs living in poverty. What follows is the practitioner-level account of what the constraints demanded, including the parts that most project reports leave out.

For 15 years, open source has functioned as something close to scripture in ICT4D. Principles for Digital Development enshrined it as Principle 6. Digital Public Goods Alliance built a global movement around it. UNICEF Innovation declared that it would only build open source in 2026 Donor procurement guidance treats “we’ll open source it” as proof of sustainability.

If you visit DEEP on the Wayback Machine, you will not find the AI-powered humanitarian analysis platform that UN OCHA, UNHCR, UNICEF, and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre had built for their secondary data review workflows around for nearly a decade. You will find this: “The DEEP was a trusted humanitarian analysis platform that fostered collaborative and innovative solutions.

For three years, “AI for development” has been a conversation about possibility. Capability demonstrations. Pilot dashboards. Workshop slide decks. A thousand experiments in a thousand offices, each producing one good output, each one ending with the same question: what would it take to do this at scale, and to do it in a way the sector can actually trust? There wasn’t really a good answer to that question. Until now.

African AI startups captured barely 1 to 1.5% of global AI spending in 2025, even as AI pulled in close to half of all venture dollars worldwide. At the earliest stages the gap is wider still: in the second quarter of 2025, startups across the continent raised just $14 million in AI deals, about 0.02% of the $47.3 billion invested in AI globally. The constraint is not talent. It is capital, and the pathways to turn technical skill into a fundable company.

The development community is obsessing over the wrong climate threat. While everyone debates if data centers are causing rising temperatures, a groundbreaking study from Bangladesh reveals the real killer: heat doesn’t just slow down individuals. High temperatures destroy the collaborative advantage that makes teams twice as productive as solo workers. There are serious implications for ICT4D solutions.

On June 9, an American company shipped its most capable artificial intelligence model. Three days later, a letter from the US Commerce Department forced it offline for every user on the planet, with no notice and no appeal. The model was Anthropic’s Fable 5. The mechanism was an export control directive that barred access by any foreign national, so the company disabled it worldwide to comply. Other models kept running. This one did not.

Implementing case management systems in humanitarian and development contexts requires balancing individual service delivery with complex data governance requirements and donor expectations. Whether it’s tracking a child protection case, managing Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) services, or overseeing a refugee intake process, the challenge is making that data flow securely and efficiently. This challenge is amplified by a shifting macro environment.

Last week, Nivi and MSD announced a global collaboration to expand HPV disease awareness and cervical cancer prevention beginning in India, Indonesia, and Thailand, delivered through Nivi’s goal-oriented, AI-routing chat platform. The arrangement may look like a traditional development-sector initiative. The product, our askNivi chat platform, is free on WhatsApp and other popular messaging channels, and the money comes from an organizational payer, not individual end users.

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 alone, as their biggest barrier to scaling impact.