Water underpins good health, food production, and the energy that powers businesses. It also supports an estimated 1.7 billion jobs worldwide. Yet the world is massively off-track on Sustainable Development Goal 6, which aims to ensure clean water and sanitation for all by 2030. The water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) financing gap demanding dramatically higher public investments. And even the money governments do allocate for water routinely goes unspent.
Continue readingIn a time when development progress has dipped to its weakest pace in 75 years, artificial intelligence (AI) offers developing economies a rare path to greater prosperity. World Development Report 2026 provides the first comprehensive assessment of what AI means for these economies—how firms and governments are already using it, what is holding them back, where the largest gains may lie, and how the risks can be managed.
Its central message is both practical and ambitious. Developing countries do not need to build trillion-dollar, all-purpose models to benefit from AI. But importing AI tools is also not enough. Countries must adapt AI to local languages, institutions, data, and development needs; ensure that national systems can work seamlessly with multiple platforms and providers; and steadily build the skills and infrastructure needed to do more. Low-cost tools—“small AI”—can put scarce expertise within reach of millions, through text messages, voice calls, basic phones, and other technologies that work even where electricity, computing power, and internet access are limited. The gains are already visible. AI is helping to accelerate medical screening, assisting farmers with more accurate weather forecasts, and aiding teachers in creating better lessons for students.
The Report offers a clear framework—adopt, adapt, and advance—for the road ahead to help countries capture AI’s benefits without wasting scarce resources or deepening dependence on any single supplier. Earlier technological revolutions left much of the developing world behind. This landmark edition of the World Development Report offers developing economies a roadmap to prevent a repeat of that outcome.
“Credit: World Bank Group. All rights reserved”
Around the world, healthcare systems are being asked to do more with less. Populations are aging, chronic diseases are rising, and demand for specialized care is growing faster than the supply of specialists. In too many communities, geography still determines whether a patient receives timely, high-quality care.
Continue readingEvery month, millions of migrant workers send a portion of their earnings home to support their families — often providing the most reliable source of income those families have. These transfers are among the most personal financial acts in the global economy — a parent paying school fees, a family repairing a roof, a household keeping the lights on. But remittances can also do more than help families get by.
Continue reading
Implementing AI in education is both very similar to earlier challenges of integrating edtech — and at the same time very different. It is similar in that costly infrastructure constraints limit access, and skills upgrades and training are required for effective uptake at scale. What is notably different about AI is the speed of its development and roll-out. FOMO (fear of missing out) is an unfortunate but real driver of many efforts to quickly deploy AI in education before knowing exactly how to do it, who benefits and who does not, what the enabling conditions for success look like, and what it all costs. Move fast, and you might well make mistakes. But not doing anything risks that countries and communities already on the wrong side of the digital divide fall further behind their peers.
Continue readingWalk into a hospital in Nigeria, where one doctor serves every 9,000 patients–fifteen times the WHO-recommended ratio. Every minute that a doctor spends on administrative work is a minute taken from a patient who may have waited hours to be seen.
A Nigerian startup decided to do something about it. They built a voice-based tool that transcribes and structures clinical notes in real time, offline, on a small computer box installed right in the hospital ward. Doctors get time back. Patients get more of their attention. The startup did not adapt a tool built for a hospital in Boston or Berlin. They built it for the conditions on the ground in the language people speak. The result attracted investors and has a path to sustainable growth.
That story is not the exception. It is the blueprint.
Continue reading
There is a persistent and intuitively appealing idea that haunts labor market policy debates in developing economies: that jobs are a fixed pie, and if an older worker keeps a slice, a young person goes hungry. In countries where youth unemployment is stubbornly, painfully high – think Morocco at over 35 percent for those aged 15-24, or Brazil’s substantial informal workforce – it can feel almost morally obvious that older workers should step aside and make room.
Continue readingAcross the world, progress in development has slowed. Yet some countries have found ways to make remarkable gains.
Consider the examples of Rwanda, the Kyrgyz Republic, Cambodia, and Ethiopia. Each shows that development gains remain possible when governments focus on practical reforms, invest in infrastructure, and build institutions that can deliver results. Their experiences are a reminder that while the global picture is troubling, stagnation is far from inevitable.
Continue reading“Credit: World Bank Group. All rights reserved”
The Amazon rainforest is not only the world’s largest tropical forest but also a linchpin for global environmental stability and biodiversity. Its vast expanse regulates rainfall, stores immense amounts of carbon, supports biodiversity and serves as the ancestral homeland for more than 420 Indigenous Peoples and their communities. Yet, the Amazon faces mounting threats: environmental changes, rampant deforestation, and socio-economic pressures are pushing this vital ecosystem toward a tipping point.
Continue reading
Netherlands for the World Bank 