· Dan Björkegren offers some thoughts on how frontier AI models that aim to make some forms of intelligence more abundant may have different impacts in low-income countries where knowledge workers are currently scarce. “Current AI tools require substantial human guidance. So, firms in rich economies are pursuing a grafting strategy: existing knowledge workers are being asked to integrate AI into their roles…In wealthy countries, advocates concerned about jobs suggest that AI systems be designed to augment rather than automate (Acemoglu, Autor, Johnson 2026). But in low-income countries, the more urgent question may be how to provide knowledge services when few knowledge workers are available. Fully automating knowledge work could in fact augment less educated workers, who could ask AI to complete macro tasks like developing marketing strategies, rather than micro tasks like reformatting spreadsheets. However, even automated systems will likely require oversight from entrepreneurs and scientists with deep expertise, which may be sufficiently available only in wealthier countries like Brazil and India.”
· MDRC note on why Bayesian statistics might be the right approach for making policy:
“the Bayesian approach can provide direct answers to the questions that programs, funders, and policymakers often have: Does this program work? How confident can one be that effects exceed meaningful thresholds? The questions that the conventional approach can answer are generally less useful for making policy decisions, which suggests that evaluators can help decision makers extract more value from rigorous research by providing Bayesian interpretations of impact estimates.”. We have tools to help you do this – see here.
· In VoxDev, Nkechi Owoo summarizes the evidence on what holds back agricultural productivity in Ghana: “productivity gains are undermined by partial and uneven adoption of modern technologies across seeds, fertiliser, mechanisation, irrigation, and digital services. Closing this gap will require coordinated policy action that addresses financing, infrastructure, and information constraints together, rather than in isolation.”
· The new InDevelopment magazine has a couple more interesting pieces for its first edition:
o Daniel Yu on why you should start a company in a developing country instead of working in aid. Great first hand stories of how he set up a business in Kenya doing restocking to small grocery stores, with a business that has now grown to 6 countries and employs 2,000 people. But a bit of survivorship bias here, given the struggles of other entrepreneurs with similar ideas. But also a couple of other great examples “Consider Floramérica, the first cut-flower exporter in Colombia. Floramérica was founded by a few Americans in their early thirties who brought US-style business management to their pioneering venture. Within six months, they were exporting to the US and, within three years, employed 400 people. But Floramérica didn’t just grow flowers; it engineered a multinational cold chain from scratch. It negotiated with airlines to create cargo space, designed specialized refrigerated trucks to navigate Andean mountain roads, and mastered the stringent plant import standards of US Customs. This required a level of organizational knowledge that Colombian domestic business did not have at the time. By solving these complexity problems, it created a high-productivity blueprint for an entire nation.”
o Nithin Coco on how Jakarta moved from the world’s most congested city to having the largest bus rapid transit system: “in 2015, less than 20% of residents were within walking distance of transit. Now, nearly 90% of the city has access to BRT or trains.” – but also the challenges that remain “there are still more cars in Greater Jakarta now than in 2019, when the MRT opened. Ride-hailing apps have also exploded in popularity; GoJek and Grab now provide on-demand motorcycle and rideshare to millions of Jakartans everyday. The sheer number of them means that fares are cheap — often just a little more than the train for a ride that requires no walking or transfers. This means one of the core drivers of the transit development push — air pollution — has actually worsened.” See this paper by Gabriel Kreindler et al which uses the expansion of the bus system to study how commuters trade-off different attributes of a transport system such as waiting time and driving time.
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