This Week in Global Development

In this special episode of This Week in Global Development sponsored by the Lipman Family Prize, Kate Warren, Devex executive vice president and executive editor, sits down with Kaushik Kappagantulu, co-founder of Kheyti, and Thabo Lenneiye, former prize committee member and inaugural managing director of the Carl H. Goldsmith Sustainable Agriculture Fund at Penn’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy.

Together, they explore what it actually takes to turn a working solution like Kheyti’s Greenhouse-in-a-Box into policy that can scale beyond one organization and why practical, ground-level experience is crucial for shaping effective, sustainable change.

Kanika Bahl has experience in both the world of frontier AI and the work of addressing global poverty. Until earlier this year, she led Evidence Action, which has delivered health interventions to hundreds of millions of people, and served as a founding member of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust.

When Bahl considered where to focus next, she weighed a role in AI safety. Instead, she chose another challenge: building the ecosystem needed to get useful AI tools to people who could benefit from them. She now leads the AI Access Initiative, which aims to reach tens of millions of people in low- and middle-income countries through existing public systems.

Speaking during a live recording of Devex’s Global Progress in the AI Era podcast at Devex Impact House on the sidelines of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, Bahl called that work her “comparative advantage.” Without “active efforts” to spread AI’s benefits, she warned, “the gap between the global south and the developed world will explode.”

The initiative has an early test of its approach in India’s Telangana state, where it has delivered AI-enabled weather forecasts through WhatsApp to 1 million smallholder farmers. Working with the state government ahead of the monsoon season, the team turned technical forecasts into images and voice messages in the Telugu language, then tested them with farmer groups to improve the design.

“Our scale channel is the government,” Bahl said. “We’re not asking farmers to go to a channel they’ve never explored. We’re not asking patients to go outside of their normal system.”

Reaching farmers is one milestone. The larger test is whether the forecasts help them make better decisions and whether the approach can expand through government systems. Bahl said she hopes to reach 10 million farmers within six months, though her team’s more cautious target is 5 million.
Weather forecasting is one of three “big bets” the initiative identified after reviewing 50 ideas for effectiveness, affordability, the potential to reach large populations, and whether artificial intelligence could make a meaningful difference. The others are clinical decision support for health workers and tools that help patients recognize when to seek care.

The AI Access Initiative has secured $20 million in new funding to “supercharge” its work, Bahl said. And it appears that some of the “big bets” the organization has identified are gaining traction among other funders. As Devex reported, the OpenAI Foundation recently announced a $60 million commitment to bring AI-powered weather and crop disease forecasts to 100 million smallholder farmers over three years.

Bahl’s approach draws on years spent working through governments and existing delivery systems at Evidence Action and the Clinton Health Access Initiative. When Devex spoke with her earlier this year, she warned that promising AI projects could end up in “digital graveyards” if their backers failed to address funding, policy, trust, and last-mile delivery.

In healthcare, her team is exploring whether clinical decision support could be incorporated into India’s national telemedicine network. That work remains at an early stage and depends on the government and other partners adopting it.

Bahl also wants the initiative’s work to travel further than its own programs. She said her team plans to make tools and lessons open source, publish playbooks and keep updating its research on promising applications. She also plans to establish an incubator to test “the next set of big bets” that others could take to scale.

This week we learned that Dr. Mark Dybul will take over The Global Fund amid significant changes in global health, including declining traditional foreign aid and calls for institutions to consolidate their work. Having already led The Global Fund between 2013 and 2017, Dybul returns to the institution at a pivotal moment. We discuss what his appointment could mean for the future trajectory of the institution, along with the reaction from the broader global health community.

One year into its rollout, the America First Global Health Strategy has fundamentally reshaped how the United States delivers global health assistance. Although U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Jeremy Lewin have served as its most visible champions, executing this overhaul has relied on a broad network of officials operating out of the spotlight. We take a closer look at the key behind-the-scenes players driving this strategy forward.

To dig into these stories, and others, senior editor Rumbi Chakamba sits down with reporters Jenny Lei Ravelo and Sara Jerving for the latest episode of our weekly podcast series.

In a live episode of Global Progress in the AI Era, Shalina Wadhwani discussed what Wadhwani AI has learned from building tools with governments — and what she hopes a new generation of AI philanthropists will fund.

Shalina Wadhwani spent years working at digital health startups before joining the family office her father, Sunil Wadhwani, had built.

Now, as the next-gen philanthropist assumes leadership of the Wadhwani Family Office’s work, she is helping guide efforts such as Wadhwani AI, which uses artificial intelligence to improve health, education, and livelihoods in India and beyond. 

Check out Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice:
https://cuttingedgeissues.transistor.fm/

As governments face growing pressure to modernize public services and rebuild citizen trust, artificial intelligence offers new opportunities to improve service delivery. But turning AI experimentation into measurable, citizen-centered impact requires more than new technology. It calls for strong implementation, cross-sector collaboration, and a clear focus on human needs and accountability.

In this special edition episode of This Week in Global Development, sponsored by Salesforce, Devex Co-founder and Executive Vice President Alan Robbins sits down with Wendy R. Anderson, senior vice president of government and global public affairs at Salesforce. Together, they explore how governments can move beyond AI pilots to build lasting institutional capabilities, where AI is already improving public services, and why trust, human judgment, and mission-driven partnerships are essential to delivering meaningful outcomes for citizens.