Insights

Personalized AI tutors significantly enhance student learning by tailoring practice problem sequences to individual performance. In a five-month Python course across Taipei high schools, students receiving AI-personalized problem sequences outperformed peers following a standard fixed sequence, improving final exam scores by 0.15 standard deviations—equivalent to six to nine months of additional learning—without increasing instructional time or teacher workload. The AI chatbot encourages productive struggle by guiding students without giving direct answers, dynamically adjusting problem difficulty based on student interactions and mastery. This approach offers scalable, personalized learning that addresses diverse student needs more effectively than traditional curricula.
Education
How Personalized AI Tutors Can Help Students Learn
The AI for Good Machine Learning in 5G Challenge by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) unites students, researchers, and innovators to create machine learning solutions addressing local issues. Finalists from Africa and Asia develop AI models for healthcare, environmental impact measurement, and telecom troubleshooting, emphasizing practical reliability and inclusivity, such as offline Kiswahili speech recognition for low-resource devices. Participants highlight the importance of perseverance, real-world problem focus, and building robust, fail-safe AI systems. Winners are to be announced at the AI for Good Global Summit in July 2026.
Education
AI for Good: Meet the people powering machine-learning solutions
Antarctica is experiencing more extreme warm weather and precipitation changes due to climate change, leading to surface ice melting and disrupted marine ecosystems. These conditions are making traditional scientific research increasingly difficult and dangerous, with melting ice affecting airstrips, shipping routes, and safety at research stations. However, advancements in autonomous technologies such as underwater gliders, drones, and digital twin ocean models offer safer, more efficient, and lower-carbon methods for gathering crucial data. International collaboration remains essential to improve understanding of Antarctica's changing environment and its global impacts.
Antarctica
Extreme weather is making Antarctic research harder, but new technology is providing some answers – new study
Significant market consolidation characterizes the digital infrastructure supporting Latin American media, with dominant companies like Alphabet and Meta presenting major commercial risks. The analysis of over 400 data points across 18 media outlets in six countries reveals that 50–100% of infrastructure providers operate under U.S. jurisdiction, exposing these media to geopolitical risks tied to U.S. government policies. This dependency underscores the need for media autonomy through control of underlying digital infrastructure, aligning with historical calls for a New World Information and Communication Order.
Bolivia, Colombia, Ghana, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines | Financial services, ICT
Informational Sovereignty: The Commercial and Geopolitical Risk of Newsroom Dependency on Third-Party Infrastructure in Latin America
The concept of “plural protocol ecosystems” is proposed as a robust alternative to centralized digital infrastructures controlled by tech monopolies. Current regulatory efforts, such as European competition law, fail to disrupt the fundamental architectural concentration of power. This approach shifts focus to community-led, open digital protocols embedding democratic values, human rights, and sovereignty at their core. It promotes technical plurality through decentralization and privacy-by-design, economic plurality by fairly distributing value to data creators and users, and social plurality via participatory governance and community autonomy. This framework aims to transform users into active co-creators with agency, fostering trust, neutrality, and resilient digital ecosystems aligned with public interest.
ICT
The Plural Stack: Rebuilding Our Digital Foundations from Protocol Up
Every digital interaction generates data that powers the AI revolution, yet the average user views this data as worthless because it is collected and used without their consent or compensation. This situation, termed "data nihilism," highlights a growing imbalance where AI developers benefit immensely while individuals feel powerless over their own data. To address this, ethical data curation, transparent consent mechanisms, and fair compensation for data contributors must become priorities for AI researchers and regulators. Ensuring respect, consent, and shared value in data use is crucial to prevent AI’s benefits from being concentrated among a few at the expense of the many.
Are We Entering the Age of Data Nihilism?
Modern states rely heavily on critical digital infrastructure integral to governance, including identity systems, registries, payments, and public services. These systems are vulnerable to disruptions from war, cyberattacks, terrorism, and natural disasters, with AI amplifying the dependence on concentrated, capital-intensive infrastructure often located beyond national borders. Digital embassies offer a strategic solution by enabling states to legally, technically, and politically secure and operate vital digital functions through trusted infrastructure abroad. These facilities ensure state continuity, resilience, and sovereignty by maintaining essential governmental operations even during domestic disruptions. For host states, digital embassies present economic and strategic benefits, though they require robust safeguards to manage associated risks.
Financial services, Education, ICT
Digital Embassies and AI Sovereignty: Building Resilient States Beyond Borders
Democratic wellbeing in the UK depends on people having meaningful voice and choice in decisions affecting their lives, making the strengthening of parliamentary democracy crucial. Enhancing the four UK parliaments through deeper public engagement and citizen deliberation, especially via mini-publics, can improve institutional capacity to tackle complex policy challenges while maintaining public trust. Mini-publics involve diverse, randomly selected citizens engaging in evidence-based deliberation, offering a practical mechanism to embed considered public judgment within legislative decision-making.
Blueprints for Democratic Wellbeing
Protected areas have evolved into contested spaces where security risks, environmental protection, and local livelihoods intersect. In Benin, Brazil, and Nepal, the management of these pressures depends not only on enforcement capacity but on the interactions between security actors, conservation authorities, and communities within broader governance systems. Key challenges include balancing territorial control with community presence, enforcement with legitimacy, and conservation goals with livelihood needs. Three governance models—security-led, participatory, and integrated—each have strengths and limitations, showing that sustainable outcomes rely on balancing competing objectives rather than a single approach. Strengthening coordination, accountability, and community engagement is essential as environmental and security issues increasingly converge in protected areas.
Latin America | Financial services, Health
Security sector governance’s contribution to protecting national parks
The United Nations' Global Dialogue on AI Governance, emerging from the 2024 Global Digital Compact and related UN negotiations, will convene in July 2024 in Geneva to address AI governance. This dialogue is part of a broader series of international AI summits in locations like Bletchley Park, Seoul, Paris, New Delhi, and soon Switzerland, which focus variably on AI safety, investment, adoption, and inclusive governance with Global South participation. While these summits have raised political awareness and mobilized resources, they have yet to achieve consistent, lasting coordinated governance outcomes in AI regulation.
The World Is Trying to Govern AI. The UN Wants In.
The playbook by Eric Hysen assesses the risks and benefits of government AI adoption, providing a comprehensive analysis of public-sector AI governance systems, frameworks, policies, and approaches. It highlights a federal shift toward faster adoption and reduced regulatory burdens. Based on literature and interviews, it guides public-sector leaders in establishing AI governance that ensures AI systems are safe, ethical, secure, and aligned with organizational missions and values.
Best Practices in Public-Sector AI Governance: A Practitioner’s Playbook
The book edited by Katja Mayer, Astrid Mager, and Renée Ridgway examines openness in digital knowledge infrastructures as a socio-technical and political process, not merely a technical ideal. It analyzes how openness is designed, governed, contested, and practiced across open source software, internet standards, public data systems, citizen science platforms, and alternative computing. The volume highlights the embedded power dynamics, ethical tensions, and struggles for epistemic justice shaping these infrastructures. It also explores community-driven efforts for alternative openness and strategies for sustaining open infrastructures as digital commons to support democratic governance and economic sovereignty.
ICT
The Politics of Open Infrastructures
This issue of the Asian Development Review centers on rural development, sustainability, and welfare in Asia and the Pacific, highlighting the continued importance of rural sectors for livelihoods and equity. It features studies on China's ecological restoration program, Nepal's rural road expansion and its economic impact, and Thailand's welfare card poverty reduction. Additional articles analyze income inequality reduction strategies in Mongolia, airport efficiency in ASEAN, foreign direct investment effects on Vietnamese firms, the relationship between prosperity and inequality in ASEAN, and birth order impacts on child nutrition in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh
Asian Development Review: Volume 43, Number 2
Investment funds are withdrawing from Asia-Pacific biodiversity hotspots due to risks linked to high biodiversity loss and weak legal protections, treating these regions as financial hazards. Research shows that robust legal frameworks for nature conservation can reduce capital flight by providing financial security. Innovative solutions, such as ecosystem service credits in China and biodiversity bonds like Australia’s A$150 million Nature Bond, demonstrate how conservation can become financially attractive. Advancements in biodiversity risk measurement and natural capital accounting are improving transparency and valuation, encouraging investment. Regional cooperation and harmonized standards are essential to address cross-border ecological and financial risks and retain capital for nature-positive investments.
Latin America | Financial services
Why Investment Funds Are Fleeing Biodiversity Hotspots-And How to Stop Them
The On Think Tanks 2026 Conference in Rabat, Morocco, spotlighted the challenges and importance of Global South think tanks in global policy debates. Southern Voice, with 13 members present, emphasized the need to dismantle barriers like funding constraints, visa restrictions, and lack of visibility that hinder these think tanks' meaningful engagement. The session concluded that enhancing visibility through digital presence and institutional ambassadors, alongside flexible funding and strategic support from partners, is crucial. Strengthening Southern think tanks fosters equitable representation, better global policy, and addresses systemic asymmetries in development. Southern Voice continues to build a collaborative network advancing these goals.
Africa
Southern Think Tanks’s Role in Global Policy Debates: Insights from the OTT 2026 Conference
Following the Taliban's return in 2021, Afghan female academics were nearly completely barred from work, education, and public life, reversing two decades of progress. Universities closed to women, girls’ education was banned after age 12, and women faced severe social restrictions. Interviews with 12 female academics revealed profound personal loss, despair, and psychological distress due to the erosion of their roles and identities. The Taliban's policies are seen as political misuse of Islamic teachings rather than genuine religious mandates. Islamic feminism offers a culturally rooted framework for resistance, emphasizing that Islam supports women's rights. Despite harsh conditions, some women strive to continue teaching and seek international support to restore educational opportunities.
What happened to Afghanistan’s female academics?
Tony Blair criticized Keir Starmer's Labour leadership for lacking vision, hesitating on tough decisions, neglecting economic growth, and failing to clarify policy priorities. However, many of these critiques also reflect challenges faced during Blair's own New Labour era. Blair's tenure saw significant economic growth and social reforms but also controversies like the Iraq War and migration rises, which shaped current difficulties. Both New Labour and Starmer's Labour emphasize pragmatic, technocratic social democracy focused on gradual reforms and trade-offs shaped by context. The current party's cautious approach contrasts with calls for bold vision, but Blair's criticisms highlight ongoing tensions within Labour’s evolving identity and strategy.
Tony Blair has taken aim at Keir Starmer – but some of his criticisms apply to New Labour too
Indonesia abandoned its plan to close the Cirebon-1 coal plant, a key part of the $21.4 billion Just Energy Transition Partnership (Jet-P) aimed at ending coal use. Despite backing from the US, UK, Japan, and EU, these partnerships have struggled to attract the private investment needed to replace coal with renewables. Disbursed public funds in Indonesia total only $1.1 billion against a $97 billion investment need by 2030, hindered by complex financing and regulatory challenges. Decommissioning coal plants is costly and risky, deterring investors seeking high returns and low risks. Moreover, most Jet-P funds are loans, increasing Indonesia's debt while forcing it to "pay twice"—to close coal plants and buy new renewable power—raising concerns about electricity affordability and state capacity for managing transitions.
Indonesia | Financial services
Why the world’s most ambitious coal phase‑out deal has failed – and what it means for climate finance
Quantum computers, operating on quantum mechanics principles, promise to solve complex problems much faster than classical computers, including breaking current encryption methods. Peter Shor's 1994 quantum algorithm demonstrated the potential to crack standard encryption, prompting military and intelligence investments. However, new post-quantum cryptography standards have been developed to protect data against quantum attacks, aiming to prevent a "cryptography apocalypse." Practical quantum machines are expected within 10-20 years, likely first in specialized tasks. Beyond decryption, quantum computers hold potential for advances in scientific modeling, climate change, cancer treatment, and clean energy. The field is heavily influenced by geopolitical competition, especially among the US, China, and Russia.
Financial services
Quantum computers could expose our digital secrets – but there are much better reasons to build them
Generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), continue to produce hallucinations—confident but incorrect information—even in simple fact-based tasks. Improvements in factuality have largely stemmed from expanding models’ knowledge rather than enhancing their ability to recognize when they do not know an answer. This inherent difficulty creates a tradeoff between avoiding hallucinations and maintaining utility. Introducing metacognition, or the model’s awareness of its own uncertainty, offers a solution: by faithfully expressing uncertainty, models can communicate doubts honestly, improving trustworthiness and capability. Metacognition enables LLMs to better decide when to seek external information and what to trust, marking a critical step toward reliable AI systems.
Hallucinations Undermine Trust; Metacognition is a Way Forward

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