The World Bank today urged developing countries to adopt artificial intelligence technology tools to achieve better governance outcomes, warning that they risked being left behind if they failed to do so.
“AI has offered a lifeline to developing economies and they should take it,” said Indermit Gill, chief economist of the World Bank Group, as the group published its annual World Development Report.
“They don’t need big models or big data centers to get value out of it,” he said, calling for adapting cheaper AI technologies to local settings to bring outcomes in the health, education, justice and agricultural sectors.
Most of these advanced AI models, capable of rapid data analysis and automating numerous jobs that would otherwise take competent humans longer to perform, were developed in the U.S. and China.
But these AI models demand giant data centers and immense amounts of powerful computation, consuming enormous quantities of electricity and water, with consequences for climate change.
“Developing economies today are having the weakest average growth performance in three decades,” stated a World Bank statement accompanying the research.
“AI could help enhance that performance significantly before the end of the 2020s, while providing real benefits to people.”
The paper urges countries to embrace AI to “help extend otherwise costly medical, legal, educational and agricultural services to underserved billions — doing in a decade what might otherwise take a century.”
Shocks upon Shocks
The 2020s have been blighted by successive shocks for lower-income nations, with the World Bank calling it a “lost decade” for their economic progress earlier this year.
The Bank has cut its global growth prediction for 2026 to the lowest since the epidemic as the economic damage from the Iran war hits countries around the world. Economics 3rd
Asia has been the worst hit, with low-income and emerging countries bearing the brunt of the shock.
In its latest paper, the Bank calls for poor countries to start working with localised AI tools and solutions today, and to invest in electricity generation and distribution; extend access to computer power; and improve the availability of local data.
“The window to do this right is narrow,” said study director Gaurav Nayyar.
“AI is a once in a lifetime opportunity to solve problems that have defied solution for generations,” he continued.
More over 6.8 billion people — or 83 percent of humanity — live in low-income and developing countries, and AI tools will need to be customised to serve their needs.
The paper gives instances of AI uses in governance, such as to enhance diabetes screening volumes in Bangladesh, or in reducing costs for Indian farmers through advanced weather forecasts.
The research points out that the solutions will need to meet people where they are.
“For example, AI solutions will need to be delivered through voice calls on basic mobile phones for people who cannot read or afford smartphones,” it reads.
“Just importing an AI model and expecting it to do well locally is not enough.
The paper also calls on governments to establish public trust as they extend AI’s use.
Better public services, better education outcomes in schools, would build trust, the statement stated. But if AI built bias into government choices, or undermined data privacy, then it would be hard to win that trust back.
The paper also issues a strong warning: “AI could widen gaps between countries, increase inequality within them, concentrate market power, weaken trust in public institutions and create new risks for safety, rights and social cohesion.”
It says that while the risk to jobs in underdeveloped economies is minor for now, in the long run AI tools could block economic mobility by destroying many of the middle-class positions that provide it. Economics and
According to a disclosure, the report was prepared with the assistance of many of the world’s most advanced AI tools, including offers from OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google and Anthropic.
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