Sunita Grote, Lead, UNICEF Ventures, UNICEF, United States

1. How do you use technology/policy to improve citizens’ lives? Tell us about your role or organisation. 

We consider emerging technologies to have significant potential to improve the lives of children.

Through the Ventures team, within UNICEF’s Office of Innovation, we explore if and how this potential could be realised by supporting the development, piloting and packaging of promising open source digital solutions.

We look to increase the number of innovations that could be leveraged to accelerate results for children – and we focus on strengthening ecosystems and innovators from markets that are often underrepresented in technology.

We try to maximise our impact by making technology innovations universally accessible by creating digital public goods, in collaboration with the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA).

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2. What was the most impactful project you worked on this year?

We have exploring, including through the UNICEF Venture Fund, that provides seed funding to early-stage technology solutions, the application of AI to increase access to life saving information and content.

The dissemination of content and information is critical to provide training and capacity building, in learning and education including for children with disabilities, in preparation for and response to crises and in many other situations.

UNICEF Ventures has been supporting start-ups and UNICEF offices to pilot the application of AI to efficiently convert information into those formats most accessible for a range of communities – this could be text to speech and speech to text, conversion into easy-read formats, automated translation into local languages.

For instance, in DRC, we have been using automated translation to reach emergency responders more efficiently in local languages.

In Burkina Faso, we have been testing speech-to-text capabilities to increase engagement, and amplify the voices of young people in decision making.

3. What was one unexpected learning from 2024? 

Half of the world’s population (or 4.1 billion) are women, yet the needs of women and girls have been historically underrepresented in innovation and research.

For example, FemTech solutions represent just 2% of all health tech investments and this is compounded by lack of funding flows to developing economies and to women founders.

I had been aware of this gap, but not of its size and the extent to which it affects how technology solutions currently fail to respond to the needs of women.

So, in 2024, we set out to develop a FemTech strategy for the UNICEF Venture Fund which we will be gearing up in 2025.

Investing in and supporting technology solutions that respond to the needs of women - may it be to address specific health care needs such as reproductive health or those that affect women disproportionately, or those that promote gender equality by being social and economic enables (e.g. safety, autonomy, financial literacy) – will be a big focus as we aim to demonstrate how technology solutions can be designed to be inclusive.

4. What’s a tool or technique you’re excited to explore in 2025?

The UNICEF Venture Fund just launched a new call for applications focused on digital trust and data to identify new solutions for our partners to leverage as digital public goods.

Digital technology has opened unprecedented opportunities for children and young people, providing access to information, culture, communication, and entertainment.

However, these advantages also present new risks, especially around data integrity and misinformation. As technology evolves, so will digital trust.

We are excited to work next year with innovators developing groundbreaking technologies that secure data collection, promote media literacy, and counter misinformation to build a safer online environment for children.

5. Everybody’s talking about AI today – give us your hot take on AI and what it means for the public sector. 

The success of AI will depend in the long-term not just on what we use it for – but how we build, implement and monitor it. AI holds huge potential to support the public sector across policy development, implementation and programme design and delivery – and to engage with its citizens meaningfully.

Turning this potential into a reality will depend on how inclusive AI systems are in their design, who is building them and to what extent we are able to examine and monitor them.

Building AI systems as digital public goods can help us ensure that everyone can understand how the system was designed and whom it may benefit.

This approach can also maximise the value that local ecosystems can gain, in terms of closing the talent and financing gap that currently exists in AI.

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6. Who inspires you today? 

I have recently had the privilege of seeing a number of young, female ministers who are leading the charge in bringing inclusive digital efforts to their countries.

They are bringing the voices of future generations and are designing new systems for their countries to be leaders in technology and not just passive users.