Samurdhi’s community-based banking system provides a foundation in Sri Lanka through savings, member participation and livelihood support. Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank offers useful lessons in lending without conventional collateral, organising small borrower groups and placing women at the centre of financial participation.
AI may genuinely extend the horizon over which seasonal climate risk can be estimated. For communities across South Asia living under the influence of the monsoon, a longer view could mean the difference between a farmer adjusting her planting in time and a family receiving a flood warning too late to act.
The core data architecture — a national road safety data lake, AI-powered enforcement, multilingual public awareness — is replicable at any scale, in any South Asian language, in any South Asian urban or rural road environment. The technology does not need to be reinvented for Dhaka, Kathmandu or Karachi. It needs to be validated in Colombo and…
The same generative AI that allows criminals to craft perfect phishing emails in Sinhala (or Hindi, Bangla and Urdu) or clone a Chief Financial Officer's voice from a YouTube clip, can also detect those emails before they reach an inbox and flag that voice as synthetic before a payment is authorised. The technology exists. The question is…
South Asia’s future depends on reliable infrastructure and trustworthy public services. Artificial intelligence—especially advanced technologies such as Graph Attention Networks—offers governments a powerful tool to reduce corruption in procurement, improve healthcare delivery, strengthen energy security and enhance public…
