If they act now, AI could help them achieve in a decade what might have taken a century
WASHINGTON, August 4, 2026—Artificial intelligence (AI) could allow developing countries to do in a decade what might otherwise take a century—provided that governments act swiftly to close the gaps in power, connectivity, skills, and institutional quality that threaten to leave them behind, according to the World Bank Group’s World Development Report 2026: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence.
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”
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 readingWARSAW, June 22, 2026—Artificial intelligence could increase Poland’s real GDP by between 1.3% and 12.1% by 2035, according to a new World Bank Group report. The scale of the gains will depend on how quickly firms invest, how rapidly workers adapt, and whether policies enable the transition.
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Technology is often celebrated as an engine of growth and development, conjuring images of advanced machinery, artificial intelligence, and cutting-edge innovation. Nature, by contrast, is too often considered as something separate from technology, or even something to be protected from or balanced against it. But this framing misses a deeper truth. Nature is ancient intelligence. It is the original AI.
Central banks are among the most data-dense public institutions. As they modernize digital payments and financial supervision, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled analytics and supervisory technology (SupTech) enable them to draw connections across the large datasets they hold. In doing so, these tools expand central banks’ ability to infer information about legal entities and individuals beyond what is directly contained in any single dataset.
When people talk about AI in education, they usually mean AI in classrooms: devices, chatbots, adaptive platforms. The conversation quickly stalls because many schools in low- and middle-income countries lack the infrastructure. So, AI becomes something for well-resourced systems, and everyone else waits.
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