The use of frontier technologies to address biodiversity loss is gaining momentum in LMICs, promising to make monitoring faster, cheaper, and more accessible. But their success depends on much more than technological sophistication.

Through four pilots at the FT Hub, we’ve been surfacing learning about the potential to scale distributed manufacturing in different contexts. This deep dive aims to collate the learning from our pilot portfolio, and extend it with six additional case studies.

The Frontier Technologies Hub is currently in the process of conducting a review, along with Impact Plus, to reflect on what we’ve learned about blockchain, it’s application in the international development and humanitarian contexts, and what this means for the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, and other actors, when it comes to implementing blockchain for impact.

This brief shares the key lessons learned from COVIDaction Local Production Local Solutions (LPLS).  Through its work, LPLS identified that localisation of production, distributed manufacturing and circular economy approaches can help increase resilience to emergencies and improve the responsiveness of production systems to community needs. These approaches can also help to reduce waste, limit carbon emissions, and mitigate the impacts of production systems on the environment.

A nuanced look at safety and security in drone-enabled healthcare logistics in Africa

Data-driven technologies have enormous potential to support the work of UK Aid. The FT Hub commissioned a then-DFID wide survey that highlighted big data analysis and applications as holding the greatest potential of any frontier technology to impact its work.

This paper seeks to share key principles around how telehealth and data innovations can be used to support more resilient health systems. Findings are based on the learnings of the COVIDaction Resilient Health Systems (RHS) program, which tested a new way of rapidly supporting innovators to strengthen health systems, in response to the pandemic.

A review of pilot documentation and interviews with pilot implementers from across 7 UAV pilots, with some key lessons learned and recommendations.

The Data Frontier is a 7-part podcast series examining the newest uses of data in development and diplomacy, with people at the heart of the data frontier. In each episode, we hear from a guest using digital data in different ways.

The study, commissioned by the FCDO and the Frontier Technologies Hub, identifies the 10 most promising technologies for climate action.

Stories about how to overcome the biggest challenges in tech for global development, straight from those who’ve been there and done it.