Over the past decade, the government has prioritized technological development as a pillar of national growth. The Ministry of ICT and Innovation has established initiatives  around responsible AI governance, universities like Carnegie Mellon Africa have begun building research capacity, and local startups are experimenting with machine learning in sectors ranging from healthcare to financial services.  However, a crucial detail is often overlooked: many of the foundations enabling Rwanda’s digital ecosystem are supported by international development institutions.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has the second-largest rainforest in the world, absorbing tonnes of carbon on behalf of the planet, yet its debt carrying capacity is assessed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) using metrics that treat its natural capital as financially insignificant and economically invisible. The IMF and WB have long used Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA) as a framework to support Low-Income Countries (LICs) in their borrowing decisions in a world that never had to price nature. That world no longer exists.

The U.S. dollar’s dominance has been anchored to the global dependency on fossil fuels to stimulate unfaltering demand for the currency—the petrodollar—and underpin American geopolitical unipolarity. However, Chinese solar panel infrastructure and the Chinese Renminbi are disrupting global energy markets and threatening global demand for fossil fuels and the dominance of the petrodollar system. 

For many Turks, the instinct after receiving a paycheck in Lira is to convert it immediately into US dollars or gold. Besides the US dollar and gold, Turkish citizens widely used an alternative, Tether (USDT), a type of “digital dollar” designed to maintain a one-to-one value with the US dollar. Crypto adoption in countries like Turkey is driven not by technological enthusiasm but by necessity, and this behavior exposes structural gaps in the global financial architecture.