How do we redefine development in an era of constrained funding, rising geopolitical tensions, and technological uncertainty? Join CID for Global Empowerment Meeting (GEM): Reimagining International Development on May 4-5, 2026.
By Emily Janoch
The Harvard Center for International Development’s 2025 Global Empowerment Meeting, GEM25: Catalyzing AI for Inclusive Change, didn’t just meet expectations, it completely reshaped how I think about AI, global development, and what meaningful impact can look like in a year defined by disruption.
My colleague Florence Santos and I went into GEM25 with a lot of excitement. In a year already marked by massive disruption, we were eager to carve out space to talk about the possibilities of disruption for good. Thinking about AI and how we could use it to deliver real impact in the world was a shot of energy we’d been looking forward to. Leading up to the conference, I had worked with Kalkidan Lakew, one of my favorite colleagues, and Ritul Madhukar, a brilliant HKS student, to record a Road to GEM podcast on how AI could help unlock participation and impact.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how hands-on, and humbling, the experience would be. In one session, a student walked me through how to navigate ChatGPT to write policy recommendations. (Let’s just say: I had a lot to learn. Florence was better.) That moment inspired me to invest more seriously in building my own AI skills once I returned home.
But the biggest surprise wasn’t the learning curve. It was that GEM sparked one of the most exciting and meaningful projects I’ve worked on all year. It’s one that has kept me curious, gotten me on early phone calls even on crazy hard days, and had me leaving every meeting looking forward to the next one. It was the project that kept me asking: how do we turn disruption into something positive?
Harnessing AI to Ensure Scarce Resources Reach the Communities Where They Matter Most
As part of GEM, my colleague and I had the good fortune to meet CID Faculty Affiliate Dr. Milind Tambe, the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. His credentials and awards are extraordinary, but what stood out was something else: he listens deeply. Dr. Tambe leans in when people talk, no matter who they are. He actively seeks to learn in every conversation. He sees a whole world of possibilities to apply technology to make people’s lives better.
He shared that while technology is fascinating, he evaluates projects first and foremost by their potential for social impact. He talked about helping young people experiencing homelessness in LA get access to HIV prevention and about connecting high risk pregnant women in India to follow up care. In a world where resources are going down and need is going up, Dr. Tambe painted a picture of AI helping to channel support to the people who need it most and maximizing the impact of every intervention.
We left GEM inspired. We called our country teams, and they could not wait to get started. We were looking for projects that could make a difference, start soon, and had the potential to scale through national governments. From the beginning, our north star has been to build tools that can change millions of lives, not just pilots that work in isolation.
Leveraging AI to Ease the Burden on Health Workers and Improve Patient Care
With that in mind, we’re now working on two AI-driven global health projects with Dr. Tambe and his team:
1. Managing health worker workloads in Ethiopia
Ethiopia's primary community health strategy depends on over 40,000 Health Extension Workers who provide essential services and guidance. The scale is daunting: typically, two health workers serve 1,000 households. Imagine trying to deliver last mile health services for 3,000-5,000 people, usually on foot, with 18 health packages for each family that range from hygiene and environmental sanitation to health education.
The challenge is prioritization: health workers currently lack a systematic, data-driven method to determine where to focus their limited time for maximum health impact.
We’re developing AI tools that deliver weekly priority lists, helping each health worker identify which visits are going to save the most lives.
2. Improving follow up care for malnourished kids in Nepal
Despite progress in recent decades, Nepal continues to face a severe malnutrition crisis affecting its youngest citizens. 25% of kids are stunted, which can lead to lifelong cognitive problems, and 40% of kids are anemic, which makes it harder to learn in school. Nearly 2 million children suffer from some form of malnutrition. Solving just 10% of this problem with better follow-up care could result in improved lives for at least 200,000 kids a year.
Nepal's community health system depends on 52,000 Female Community Health Volunteers and facility-based health workers. However, current digital health information management systems track aggregate services in an area, not individual follow-up for at-risk patients. This makes it difficult to ensure at-risk children receive timely care.
CARE and Harvard are working on an AI-enabled mobile tool designed for low-connectivity settings (reaching the 65% of Nepalis in such environments). The tool helps frontline workers to:
prioritize follow-up visits,
deliver tailored counseling,
send simple mobile messages to caregivers,
and identify service gaps to facility-based service providers to improve overall performance.
The approach aligns with Nepal's National e-Health Strategy and is designed for scalability through government systems.
How We're Partnering
CARE brings deep local expertise, an understanding of how health workers in Ethiopia and Nepal currently operate, and connections to local and national governments. This ensures that what we build is not just effective, but implementable at scale and aligned with national budgets, strategies, and priorities.
The Harvard team brings cutting-edge AI expertise, along with the patience and vision to help CARE and our partners translate technical possibilities into practical, life-saving tools. They are helping us see new ways of applying AI, and combining technology with data and real-world practicalities in ways that can create lasting change.
It’s a joy of a collaboration. The kind of partnership where everyone brings something unique to the table and shares a vision for impact even when time and resources are limited. I am grateful for my colleagues’ commitment and expertise, and for the brilliance and curiosity of the Harvard team. We’re just at the start of the journey, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.
Emily Janoch
Emily Janoch
Emily Janoch is the Associate Vice President, Evidence and Learning at CARE, leveraging evidence to improve impact, build dignity, and eradicate poverty. Emily has a BA in International Studies from the University of Chicago and a Master’s in Public Policy in International and Global Affairs from the Harvard Kennedy School.
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CARE
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