Apply Now: $100,000 for African AI Startup Founders 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…

Hidden Climate Crisis Destroying Software Developer Productivity 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…

Borrow the Ceiling While Building Africa’s Artificial Intelligence Floor 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.…

Apply Now: $50,000 for Nonprofits Using Tech to Build Resilience 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…

Twenty Finance Ministers Have Leverage. One Does Not. 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 politically inert…

5 Questions to Ask of Every Digital Health AI Solution Design 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 access…

Apply Now with AI: $240M for Agricultural Commodity School Feeding Programs 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.…

Small Models and Smartphones Beat Sovereign AI GPU Clusters 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 implicit…

Built by User: $250,000 NGO Software Procurements Are Dead 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 portals into…

Apply Now: €400,000 for Digital Energy Innovations Across Africa 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 one-third…

Sovereign AI Is a Nvidia Sales Channel Using Development Language 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 making…

Community Health Workers Are Right to Distrust Artificial Intelligence Solutions 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…

Apply Now: $250,000 for African Language AI Projects 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 Ge’ez — are broadly…

Compute Reality of Artificial Intelligence in Global Health LMICs We have spent two years debating whether AI belongs in low- and middle-income country (LMIC) healthcare. That debate is over. AI is already running, whether we sanctioned it or not. Health workers paste patient symptoms into…

Apply Now: $700,000 for AI-Assisted Cervical Cancer Screening in Africa Cervical cancer kills roughly 350,000 women every year, and about 90% of those deaths happen in low- and middle-income countries. The disease is almost entirely preventable, yet the average screening coverage in sub-Saharan…

Why Voice-Only Interfaces Are Failing Small Businesses in LMICs Development practitioners are celebrating voice interfaces as the ultimate accessibility solution. Yet research from Kenya's small business sector reveals this assumption is fundamentally wrong. What happens when voice meets…

New Africa Tech Policy Insights on Nigeria, Rwanda, and Zambia For years, we explored the digital regulatory environment in an African country by: Opening fifteen browser tabs, with three of them showing 404 errors, Downloaded PDFs from three different ministry websites Asked a colleague in…

Apply Now: $200 Million to Strengthen Philippine Health Systems The Philippines ranks third globally in tuberculosis burden, with roughly 100 Filipinos dying from TB daily. It also has the fastest-growing HIV epidemic in the Western Pacific. These twin crises strain a health system contending with…

Apply Now: $290 Million for Infectious Disease Outbreak Response 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 is…

Please Treat Women as Digital Navigators of Facebook Applications 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 digital behavior:…

Optimize for Community Usage Context Not Digital Technology 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 failed." The usual suspects…

Apply Now: $500,000 for Inclusive Internet Research Projects 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 middle-income…

How Zambia’s Revenue Dreams Could Kill Digital Identity Adoption 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 revenue…

EMRs Save Lives. Why Are We Still Debating if We Fund Them? 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, not…

Apply Now: $150,000 Artificial Intelligence for Humanity Prize 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 Global…

We Built Digital Health Systems Without Securing Them. Now Constituents Are Paying for It. 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…

10 African Country Case Studies Reveal 4 Surprising Biometric Digital ID Trends 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…

Apply Now: $100,000 UNICEF Funding for Climate Tech Startups 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. Yet children…

Apply Now: $200,000 for Community-Centered Internet Connectivity Over 2 billion people remain offline, roughly a quarter of the world's population. Most live in rural, remote, or low-income communities where commercial ISPs have little incentive to build and where governments have struggled to…

3 Reasons African Mobile Money Programs Have a $1.7 Trillion AI Problem Mobile money is the one unambiguous success story in digital development. In 2024, 2.1 billion registered accounts processed 108 billion transactions worth $1.68 trillion, a 20% jump in transaction volume year-on-year.…

Surprise! You Are an Advocacy Technologist in Domestic US NGOs We are digital development practitioners in international development. Where does that role exist in domestic nonprofits working in the USA? A fascinating new research study by Lauren Chambers, a PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley,…

Apply Now: $150,000 from Gates Foundation for AI Donation Tools Global generosity is under pressure. In 2024, only 33% of adults worldwide reported donating money to charity, down four points from the previous year, with financial donations declining by 10 points or more in 19 countries.…

Apply Now: $50,000 for Internet Exchange Point Infrastructure Only 38% of Africa's population used the internet in 2024. Infrastructure bottlenecks that keep costs high and speeds low is a key problem that most development practitioners rarely discuss. What can make the internet cheaper and…

USA: 91% AI Non-Compliance Rate. What is Your Government’s Responsible AI Achievements? When I read through the 2024 US Federal AI Use Case Inventory, I expected to find a showcase of responsible digital governance. Here was the world's most powerful government, publishing a public database of…

Apply Now: $65,000 for Global Food Insecurity AgriTech Startups Acute food insecurity rose for the sixth consecutive year in 2024, with more than 295 million people across 53 countries experiencing hunger. At the same time, substantial reductions in official development assistance and humanitarian…

Apply Now: Google Accelerator Support for AI Startups in India India’s AI startup ecosystem is booming! Artificial intelligence accounted for 84% of the country’s deep tech startups and 91% of deep tech funding in 2025. Yet seed-stage funding fell 30% last year as investors grew more selective.…

Surprise! Blocking Mobile Internet Access Makes People Happier, Healthier, and More Focused I've spent over a decade advocating for mobile phone access as a pathway to development. Like many in our community, I firmly believed that connecting everyone to smartphones and mobile internet was an…

UK Just Quietly Did to Aid What Trump Did Loudly. Yet Nobody is Screaming When this USA administration dismantled USAID, people noticed. Courts intervened. Senators held hearings. Aid workers went on television. The chaos was loud, and the resistance was proportional. When the UK's Foreign,…

Apply Now: £200,000 for Your Digital Inclusion Solutions Three billion people — 38% of the world's population — experience the digital divide daily. They live within mobile broadband coverage but remain offline, blocked by barriers like device affordability, unreliable electricity, and limited…

African Citizen Digital Health Data Is Now a Condition of Global Health Funding The conversation we've been having about digital sovereignty just became concrete with the America First Global Health Strategy. The United States had signed 26 bilateral health Memorandum of Understanding with African…

Gender Productivity Paradox: Artificial Intelligence Is Failing Women We are witnessing a significant disconnect in modern development economics. While AI promises unprecedented productivity gains, with forecasts of adding $19.9 trillion to the global economy by 2030, we're simultaneously creating…

Apply Now: $30 Million to Improve Government Services with Artificial Intelligence The global market for artificial intelligence in government is projected to grow from $22 billion to nearly $100 billion by 2033, yet most developing countries have no AI initiatives in their public sectors. A…

AI Preparedness Index Shows Global South Is Not Ready for Artificial Intelligence Soltuions The IMF's AI Preparedness Index destroys the comfortable fiction that Global South countries are "leapfrogging" into AI readiness. While development practitioners debate which chatbot to deploy in refugee…

Apply Now: $60 Million to Evaluate AI Decision Support Tools for Frontline Health Workers The evidence crisis in artificial intelligence for health is stark. AI-powered triage assistants, diagnostic aids, and LLM-based symptom checkers are being deployed from Kenya to Myanmar — but without…

India Just Proved A Better Way to Build AgriTech Solutions How many AgriTech solutions promise to revolutionize smallholder farming with comprehensive digital advisory platforms? The formula is always the same: aspirational technology like sleek mobile apps, blockchain supply chains, or AI…

Direct-to-Cell Satellite Internet Is a Key Humanitarian Connectivity Tool The ICT4D community continuously debates how to connect the unconnected. We've argued about spectrum allocation, community networks, and whether Starlink is extractive. Those are important conversations. But while we debate,…

Apply Now: $500,000 to Strengthen Democracy Projects with Artificial Intelligence For the first time in more than two decades, autocracies outnumber democracies globally — 91 to 88 — according to the V-Dem Institute's Democracy Report 2025. 72% of the world's population now lives under autocratic…

Why Does AI4D Ignore Billions of People in the Global South? I've been tracking the artificial intelligence for development (AI4D) conversation for years, and I have to call out what's become an increasingly troubling pattern: we've reduced the entire Global South to just one continent. A recent…

SAHI: Radical Artificial Intelligence for Health Framework from India Many LMIC countries are releasing artificial intelligence strategies. Some of those AI strategies focus on healthcare. Most of those follow the same template: aspirational language, vague commitments to equity and safety, a…

Apply Now: $360,000 for AI4Good AgriTech Farmer Solutions Traditional agriculture extension workers are overwhelmed. Advisor-to-farmer ratios exceed 1:1,000 across developing countries. Government extension systems are unable to meet the needs of hundreds of millions of farmers. Digital solutions…