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AI for Good Innovate for Impact. Interim Report 2025

Geneva: ITU (2025), xxxiv, 828 pp.

"Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the way we address complex societal challenges, offering new possibilities in areas such as healthcare, climate resilience, education, and digital inclusion. The Innovate for Impact project was launched in 2024 to identify, support, and showcase practical A ... more

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Hamburg Declaration on Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Key Guidance

Hamburg: Hamburg Sustainability Conference; UNDP (2025), 7 pp.

"As global stakeholders from governments, international organizations, the private sector, academia, and civil society, we convene in Hamburg to shape a human-centric, human-rights-based, inclusive, open, sustainable, and responsible AI future. We commit to advancing AI for the SDGs, aligning with o ... more

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United Nations Activities on Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Geneva: ITU (2025), xvi, 500 pp.

"If 2023 was the year of generative artificial intelligence, 2024 was marked by the rapid expansion and adoption of AI, driving waves of innovation across nearly every conceivable domain. The United Nations system has kept an encouraging pace, redoubling efforts to harness the power and potential of ... more

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2025 Technology and Innovation Report: Inclusive Artificial Intelligence for Development

New York: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) (2025), xiii, 168 pp.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) Adoption by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in Zambia. A Survey Report

Internews; FHI 360; USAID (2024), 16 pp.

"The findings reveal that 44% of CSOs are currently utilizing AI tools, with generative AI being the most popular, while 96% of non-users are considering future integration. However, 54% have not yet adopted AI. Perceptions of AI’s impact on job security vary, with 48% seeing no threat, 13% percei ... more

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A return of dominant paradigm in China: Making Alibaba a development solution for rural China and the globe

Ziyi Wang

Information, Communication & Society (2024), 21 pp.

"In 2011, Alibaba launched the Taobao Villages initiative, which enables rural e-commerce and connects rural sellers with urban buyers, highlighting the role of e-commerce platforms in reducing rural poverty. This approach was later integrated into national rural development policies. As the Digital ... more

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Laptops in the Long-Run: Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program in Rural Peru

Santiago Cueto, Diether W. Beuermann, Julian Cristia, Ofer Malamud, Francisco Pardo

Inter-American Development Bank (2024), 38 pp.

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China and the Internet: Using New Media for development and Social change

Song Shi

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press (2024), 368 pp.

"Two oversimplified narratives have long dominated news reports and academic studies of China's Internet: one lauding its potentials to boost commerce, the other bemoaning state control and measures against the forces of political transformations. This bifurcation obscures the complexity of the dyna ... more

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The promises and pitfalls of cryptocurrencies and blockchain for marginalized communities

Densua Mumford, Michael Sampson, James Shires

Information, Communication & Society (2024), 18 pp.

"Cryptocurrencies, and the blockchain technology that underlies them, have attracted much attention over the last decade from scholars, tech communities, financial institutions, states and more. The extreme volatility of the cryptocurrency market has made some people very rich and cost others almost ... more

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Using social media for agricultural information dissemination: The role of informant-recipient homogeneity

Ryo Takahashi, Yasuyuki Todo, Yu Ri Kim, Yuzuka Kashiwagi, Denu Lemma Tsegaye

Journal of Developpment Effectiveness (2024), 28 pp.

"This study uses a randomised experiment targeting wheat producers in Ethiopia to examine the impact of providing market price information through Facebook on farmers’ sales behaviour. To identify the effect of informant homogeneity, we distinguished the informants’ nationality as either Ethiopi ... more

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AI for social good and the corporate capture of global development

Gianluca Lazzolino, Nicole Stremlau

Information Technology for Development, volume 30, issue 4 (2024), pp. 626-643

"This article focuses on the AI for Social Good (AI4SG) movement, which aims to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). It argues that, through AI4SG, Big Tech is attempting to advance AIdriven technosolut ... more

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Transforming rural Africa: Trends and experiences in rural communication services

Rome: FAO (2024), vii, 54 pp.

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Error 404, farmer not found: Why agricultural information services must consider how smallholders use their phones

Jonathan Steinke et al.

Alliance of Bioversity International; International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT); CGIAR (2024), 7 pp.

"Numerous barriers hinder mobile information services in delivering information effectively to smallholder farmers. Many of these barriers can be explained by farmers’ habits in using their phones. Therefore, carefully considering how exactly farmers use their phones in specific local context is c ... more

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Rural communication services: Trends and experiences in Asia and the Pacific

Rome: FAO (2024), vii, 79 pp.

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AI for Climate Action: Applications and Principles in Development Cooperation

Katelin Butler, Moritz Harzbecher, Sven Marc Egbers, Lea Voigt, Erik Lehmann, Ruth Schmidt

Bonn; Eschborn: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) (2024), 16 pp.

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Imaging and Assessing Mobile Technology for Development

Richard Musabe, John Sören Pettersson (eds.)

Newcastle upon Tyne (UK): Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2024), xvi, 186 pp.

"Several studies have already depicted the development of M4D and of Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D), and that will not be repeated here. However, as this collection of chapters have sprung out from one of the M4D conferences – the M4D 2022 in Kigali – some notes ... on what have been salient at different conferences can be made. If we start with the M4D in Senegal 2014, we can see that from that conference stems a book where the chapters “initiate evocative conversations on how mobile technologies can contribute to expanding mobile participation practices” (Wamala-Larsson, Hellström, and Scharff 2015, 12). In Mozambique, in 2016, there were some contributions connecting to radio and TV technology; the M4D 2018 conference in Uganda included some papers on how utilities can be backed by subscription schemes via mobile services, as well as by apps where citizens can report dysfunctions and illicit use. The M4D 2020 did not take place, as the COVID-19 pandemic prevented the possibility of running a conference on site and it was postponed to 2022, when Rwanda saw the first blended M4D conference. The Zoom presence for several dozen participants over three days went very well and, via two cameras and two large screens at the venue site, they blended in well at the conference. The IT maturing effect caused by the pandemic was thus noticeable. Among the presentations it was noticeable that the Internet of Things and drones, often blended with machine learning, are now imaginable as “mobile technology”. Of course, drones are always mobile, and IoT sensors often travel with cargo, but it was the realisation of the affordability of these technologies for food chain, livestock, and crop management, combined with their reliance on mobile phone networks to make use of farmers’ photos and senor data, that made such presentations appropriate at a conference that focuses on affordable communication technology. While technology is a prerequisite, in this volume, based on selected contributions to that conference, we will balance some imaginations with some assessments. The focus will not be on the “new” M4D, even though we acknowledge that it is time to set up demonstration farms with IoT and machine learning, as pointed out by Ronald Katamba from Uganda in an interview (Pettersson and Rehema 2022, 145), and books are now published on Applying Drone Technologies and Robotics for Agricultural Sustainability (Raj, Saini, and Pacheco 2023, with examples from India and Zimbabwe; see also FAO and ITU 2022). Instead, the chapters selected for this book adhere to the theme of knowledge dissemination and knowledge development, as mentioned already. One chapter was invited to report from the African Center of Excellence in Internet of Things, hosted by the University of Rwanda in Kigali, to illustrate the efforts to build native technological competence on an advanced level. That chapter simultaneously demonstrates the growing pan-African collaboration in the academic infrastructuring project." (Foreword, pages x-xi) more

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Digitalization & Gender Norms: Learnings from CARE's Digital Pilot for VSLA Members in Rwanda & Uganda

Eric Kaduru, Julia Arnold

Care (2024), 10 pp.

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Conjuring a Blockchain Pilot: Ignorance and Innovation in Humanitarian Aid

Margie Cheesman

Geopolitics (2024), 28 pp.

"When aid professionals adopt high tech pilot projects, ignorance, blind faith, misplaced trust, and authentic expertise all come into play. Based on ethnographic research in Jordan, I examine how a refugee aid organisation produces and applies a blockchain pilot. Innovative pilots help internationa ... more

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Rural communication services for family farming in Asia and the Pacific: Regional consultation and forum

Rome: FAO (2024), x, 41 pp.

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ICT and Rural Development in the Global South
Top Insights

Quick Overview

Willem van Eekelen

London; New York: Routledge (2024), xiii, 211 pp.

"Drawing on years of experience across 45 counties, as well as extensive original academic research, Willem van Eekelen situates the evolving role of ICT in wider development patterns in the Global South. He discusses the effects of ICT on agriculture, trade, financial flows, resource management and ... more

Hamburg Declaration on Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Key Guidance

ICT and Rural Development in the Global South Top Insights Quick Overview

Hamburg Declaration on Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Key Guidance

ICT and Rural Development in the Global South
Top Insights

Quick Overview