Future Present: AI Solutions Changing Children’s Lives Today
Artificial intelligence (AI) holds real potential to address challenges affecting children’s lives – from accelerating access to healthcare and quality education to building climate resilience in low-resource communities. However, technology not designed with children’s rights and wellbeing in mind can cause real harm.
UNICEF has a clear purpose: to ensure AI benefits every child, not just some. This means unlocking AI’s potential for good while implementing guardrails to protect children.
Innovative Collaborations
The UNICEF Office of Innovation (OOI) works alongside innovators, governments, and partners across sectors and around the world to co-create solutions, generate evidence, and shape the conditions in which AI delivers for children. This article showcases examples of AI solutions developed in, by, and for emerging economies, demonstrating proof points of possibility-driven innovation.
Case Study: Lao People’s Democratic Republic
In the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, air pollution threatens health and lives. A project installing AI-powered pollution monitors in schools provides authorities with the data and insights necessary to protect children. Currently, 148 real-time monitors are installed, feeding live information to government databases, with plans for further installations as this technology evolves into a scalable solution for children.
Harnessing AI for Global Impact
As AI rapidly advances, OOI is harnessing its potential to deliver global social impact for children. This is about more than imagining a brighter future; it’s about changing realities today. UNICEF collaborates with an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and technologists in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Pacific to deploy AI solutions for children.
Commitment to Children’s Rights
At OOI, the focus is on advocating for AI systems that uphold and protect children’s rights. The innovators involved share this commitment, designing novel AI-powered solutions that tackle social challenges in their communities, focusing on health, climate resilience, and education.
Bridging Hard and Soft Skills
This blend of hard technology and soft skills is crucial to ensure children benefit and thrive. The AI in Play platform combines both aspects, creating a foundation for partnerships that support diverse builders of AI for social good and equip young people everywhere with AI literacy.
Embedding Rights in AI Governance
AI can deliver public benefits if governments and companies embed children’s rights into emerging AI governance frameworks. While there are inherent risks, opportunities to improve outcomes for children also exist. Use cases in health, education, accessibility, and climate resilience demonstrate transformative applications already emerging from frontier technology.
Supporting Community Health Workers
With an estimated 3.8 million community health workers in 98 countries providing care, AI can support these unsung heroes through training, automated diagnosis, triage, and case management.
Enhancing Educational Access
AI can benefit students, teachers, and education systems, making learning more accessible and personalized while supporting teachers with automation and data insights.
Addressing Climate Change
As climate change impacts grow more severe, UNICEF focuses on designing systems that track and anticipate climate risks, enabling targeted interventions to safeguard children and enhance their resilience.
An Expanding Ecosystem of Solutions
No single solution will transform childhood outcomes alone, but collectively, they map the contours of possibility. The solutions discussed are part of an expanding ecosystem of AI-powered tools designed by startups in emerging markets, responding to social needs in their communities. UNICEF supports this ecosystem by funding, testing, piloting, verifying, and scaling solutions to ensure every child has a fair chance at a healthy, educated, and climate-resilient life.
Call to Action
Decisions made today will determine whether AI amplifies inequality or helps dismantle it. UNICEF is actively convening governments, backing innovators, shaping governance, and building proof points of responsible, child-centered AI. The tools to meet urgent needs exist; what is needed are the partnerships and commitments to act: together, at scale, and without delay.
Startups and partners already collaborating with UNICEF—including Arm, Ethereum Foundation, GSR Foundation, Sida, and Temasek Foundation—are unlocking the potential for socially impactful technology.
A Vision for the Future
The future envisioned for children is not distant; it is already taking shape in clinics in Tanzania, classrooms in Indonesia, and flood-prone communities in India. These solutions illustrate that AI can be developed with equity and rights at its core, and that emerging economies are not waiting to receive technology—they are actively creating it.
UNICEF’s role is to accelerate this work, connecting innovators with resources, evidence with policy, and ambition with accountability. The future is present; our task is to make it universal. Join us.
