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African Development Bank and AXIAN Launch Digital Finance Programme to Support 34,000 Women-led Businesses in Africa
Supported by the African Development Bank’s Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa (AFAWA) initiative and the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi), the programme aims to address one of the biggest constraints facing women-owned businesses in Africa – limited access to finance.
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Analysis: Dismissing Microfinance Won’t Help Solve Global Poverty
Microfinance isn’t a cure-all solution to poverty, but abandoning it would ignore the real evidence that responsible financial services make a positive, lasting impact on people’s lives.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Global
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The Risks of Saying No to AI in Global Development: How Organisations Can Move Past Restrictions to Provide Responsible Guidance
In many global development and social impact organisations, the use cases of artificial intelligence are not based on formal policies or other top-down guidance. Instead, according to Loksan Harley at Homelands AI, staff at these organisations are using publicly available AI tools to perform ad hoc workarounds, often with little sense of how outputs should be checked, where their own human judgement must be used, and what types of training data should never be uploaded. Meanwhile, some leaders are embracing staff experimentation in the absence of an organisational policy and simply hoping the question resolves itself, while others are restricting or even banning the use of these tools. He argues that saying no to AI keeps staff's use of this technology invisible — the one condition under which none of its risks can be managed — and proposes a more responsible and realistic approach to AI adoption.
- Categories
- Technology
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Indermit Gill’s Parting Thoughts as He Exits the World Bank
Outgoing World Bank chief economist talks debt and discord, while Germany slashes development aid and low- and middle-income countries search for bankable climate solutions.
- Categories
- Education, Energy, Environment, Finance, Health Care, Investing, Technology, WASH
- Region
- Global
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Analysis: Growth Without Work: The Human Cost of the AI Revolution
'In an excerpt from his book “The New Divide: Power, Control & the Cost of AI,” writer Jibu Elias examines the technology’s impact on jobs.'
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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WHO/UNICEF Report Highlights Gaps in Health Facility Sanitation
The report calls on countries to strengthen routine monitoring and move beyond measuring whether infrastructure is present. Monitoring should increasingly assess reliability, safety, accessibility and cleanliness, as well as whether services meet the needs of patients and health workers.
- Categories
- Health Care, WASH
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- global development, hygiene, research, sanitation, water
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Analysis: Big Aid Is Over
"In Africa, governments have little to spend, and—in the short run, at least—these cuts are really going to hurt."
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Financing AI Transformation in LMICs: What Multilateral Development Banks Must Do Differently
Multilateral development banks have spent the last decade building the foundations of digital economies across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and the broadband networks, digital ID systems and other priorities they've financed are helping to make AI deployments in these markets possible. But as Kunal Walia at Dalberg Advisors explains, this funding often goes toward piloting individual use cases, expanding digital infrastructure or creating an enabling environment, rather than uniting these different components into holistic AI systems that aim to scale. He argues that multilateral development banks must rethink their approach to ensure that the infrastructure they've helped build can actually enable AI transformation.
- Categories
- Investing, Technology
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