We are building the 2026 ICT4D Conference agenda to bring you the very best of what the community has to offer in Nairobi this May. This year’s agenda has 85+ sessions, selected from a pool of over 475 sessions submitted through our abstract review process.
When we stepped back to look at what we’d assembled, we got a little curious: are there gaps between what our sector reads about on platforms like ICTWorks and what we actually show up to present and hear about at convenings like ours?
So, we did what any good data nerds would do and mapped the agenda against the conversations ICTWorks has been driving to compare. We found the need for deeper discussions.
- Please lead a roundtable discussion.
What is ICT4D Talking About?
This year’s agenda reflects genuinely important work and foundational conversations we need to be having as an ICT4D community.
AI dominates both the abstract submissions and the final agenda. It’s hard to find a theme it doesn’t touch. Practitioners want to talk about agentic AI, LLMs for crisis response, machine learning for predictive analytics, and increasingly, AI as a component of sessions that aren’t really ‘about’ AI at all.
Data ecosystems and interoperability is our largest theme. This year’s agenda shows us that the ICT4D community has moved well past the “we need to collect more data” era and into an age where we’re asking harder questions about how we actually use data responsibly for action, how we share it, and how we make use of it for cross-organizational decision-making.
The applied work is strong. Sessions on climate-smart agriculture, crop stress monitoring, health intervention delivery, and predictive modeling for climate shocks show a sector that’s putting these tools to work on problems that matter.
What We’re NOT Talking About
The ICT4D Conference has always been a practitioner-focused convening, and that shapes what shows up in the proposals. People submit sessions about what they’re building and implementing, which is exactly what makes this conference valuable.
But it also means that some of the bigger structural issues the sector is facing tend to show up less in abstract submissions, even when they’re on everyone’s minds. Some of those issues will be addressed in plenary sessions, but they’re worth calling out here.
As a community, we love talking about using data, but it seems we are less interested in talking about whether that data will survive budget cuts.
When NGOs lose funding and shut down their servers, as many have in the past year, decades of accumulated data and knowledge management go with them. USAID-funded projects generated enormous bodies of research, program data, and institutional knowledge over the years, and when that funding disappeared, so did the servers hosting it, gone into the ether.
Health information systems that organizations spent years building are now unused because there’s no funding to maintain them. Consider two examples:
- The Demographic and Health Surveys program, which provided the most comprehensive health data for over 90 countries, was shut down when USAID funding was cut, leaving surveys mid-collection in 23 countries with analysis incomplete.
- FEWS NET, the famine early warning system that covered nearly 30 countries, went dark entirely, its website pulled offline and its data inaccessible for months.
These are systems that governments and organizations relied on for day-to-day work. But you might not know any of this was happening from looking at our agenda.
Related to this, there’s the overall funding environment. The sector saw historic funding cuts in 2025. USAID, which provided $12-15 billion annually for global health programs alone, effectively shut down overnight. The UK is cutting ODA from 0.5% to 0.3% of GNI by 2027, a proportionally even larger reduction. The UN is undergoing its most significant restructuring in decades.Organizations that primarily rely on grants are really feeling the squeeze.
All of this is happening, but very few of the proposals we received made the direct connection between the technology and the funding structures that sustain it, although several sessions do cover topics like localisation and advancing digital public infrastructure.
Many of the people attending this conference are living through this crisis right now, figuring out how to keep programs running with half the budget they had two years ago. There is an understandable reluctance to dwell on the funding challenge, but it’s an essential conversation to have, especially because digital transformation can be part of the solution.
What Can You Do Now?
We built this agenda. We’re extremely proud of the sessions we accepted and the work that has gone into them. The sessions we received and chose reflect genuine priorities and important work that we need to be discussing.
But we also looked at the data and saw gaps.
All of our sessions are going to be impactful, engaging, and insightful, we’re confident about that. We need you to bring your deeper questions. Uncomfortable questions about sustainability:
- Where is there funding for our work now?
- What happens when funding dries up?
- Who’s still being left out of “inclusive” technology?
- What are we doing to truly impact the marginalized?
Get to the Q&A mics, organize hallway conversations and coffee chats, find the people working on these problems and compare notes.
We’re also introducing a format to have these very conversations, through more open and informal roundtable discussions.
- Please lead a roundtable discussion.
This agenda shows you what the sector is ready to present, but what happens in the hallways and after hours tells you what we actually need.
