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Nigeria Advances Plans for Eight-Center National Cancer Biobank Network
NICRAT and BioVana Research are developing a coordinated cancer biobanking network across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones, with priorities spanning biospecimen quality, research governance, and precision oncology.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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ADB Approves $300 Million Financing to Ensure Safe and Resilient Water Services in Sri Lanka
The project will help reduce water losses, promote renewable energy use, strengthen the capacity of the National Water Supply and Drainage Board (NWSDB), and support private sector participation in the water sector.
- Categories
- WASH
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Digital Public Infrastructure Is Supposed To Be Interoperable: Why Does the Standardization End When Something Goes Wrong?
Digital public infrastructure (DPI) is becoming more common in emerging markets, as a growing number of governments are building population-scale digital systems for identity, payments and data exchange. And as DPI increasingly crosses national borders, involving multiple governments, processes and contractors, the need for interoperability in these systems is growing. According to David Porteous at Integral: Governance Solutions, Maria Luciano, Deepti George at Yutadhi, and Sahana Arun Kumar at Amarante Consulting, this growing reach and complexity mean that redress — i.e., citizens’ ability to challenge errors in DPI systems and obtain remedy — should also be interoperable. They share insights from a research project that examined grievance redress mechanisms for 15 DPI systems in Brazil, India, South Africa, Benin and Ethiopia, exploring how they can move toward greater standardization.
- Categories
- Technology
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Press Release: WaterEquity Appoints Lauren Ferstandig as President
Founded by entrepreneurs Gary White and Matt Damon of Water.org, the success of WaterEquity is built on decades of collective experience investing in water and sanitation in emerging markets.
- Categories
- WASH
- Region
- Global
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From Nano to Investable: Why Formalising MSMEs Hasn’t Led to Scale, and What India Can Do About It
India has achieved something remarkable over the past decade: Millions of once-informal micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) have been formalized, and it is now easier to start and register a business, and access credit and government programs and markets. But according to Pranshu Chhabra, Rudra Midhun Kumar and Chiropriya Dasgupta at Quiver, over 99% of these enterprises remain at the "micro" level, and the overwhelming majority of them are classified as “nano,” a subset of the lowest level of the MSME classification. They argue that while India has become very good at bringing enterprises into the formal system, it is struggling to help them move into their next stage of growth: becoming large enough to attract formal investment. They explore this challenge, explaining why the transition from nano to investable cannot be solved by capital alone.
- Categories
- Investing
- Tags
- governance, MSMEs, public policy, scale
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Analysis: AI Safety Is Designed in the West, and Failing Users Everywhere
English-focused guardrails fail in local dialects, causing dangerous medical misdiagnoses and denied public services.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Global
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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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Viewpoint: Why We Should All Be Worried About AI in Elections
"The more important question is not what happens when AI generates a fake video of a candidate, but what happens when it is embedded in the systems that administer elections themselves — in procurement decisions, biometric voter-verification systems, and data-sharing arrangements."
- Region
- Global
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