Wayan Vota

Across low- and middle-income countries in Africa, 161 million women of reproductive age want to avoid a pregnancy, and roughly 32 million of them have an unmet demand for contraception. Clinic-based counseling has not closed that gap at the scale or cost required, and the first generation of digital health tools mostly delivered one-way SMS blasts that could not answer a follow-up question.

Has the development community learned nothing from our failures with One Laptop Per Child? The data is undeniable: progress in closing the mobile internet gender gap has stalled, with 885 million women across low- and middle-income countries still unconnected.

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.

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.

Numun Fund is the first fund dedicated to feminist technology organising in the Larger Majority World with USD 1.75 million in funding

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.

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.

The ICT4D community obsesses over mobile coverage maps while completely missing what matters for digital inclusion.

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.

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.