By: Monica Adjei | October 28, 2026
Dr. Catherine Nakalembe joined TechnoServe CEO Will Warshauer for the latest episode of Re: Development | Conversations for Change, a series on the future of international development as foreign aid budgets shrink worldwide.
Her message, in short: the risks of AI are real, the opportunities for lower-income countries are endless, and the biggest overlooked problem isn’t fancier models; it’s the lack of data to train them on. Language models work because the internet is full of text; weather and cropland/crop-type models work in the U.S. because agencies like NOAA and USDA have collected records for decades. In much of Africa, that groundwork simply doesn’t exist yet. There isn’t a single readily accessible soil-moisture station on the whole continent feeding the global network used to forecast drought. Much of her last few years has gone into doing that unappreciated work of building the datasets first. As she put it, the investment keeps flowing to compute and quick outputs, when the real need and expense is the input.
Read or watch the full conversation: “Re: Development: Dr. Catherine Nakalembe on AI in International Development”.
