Equitech Futures

Rise Innovation Fund Challenge 2026 | Semi-Finalist Spotlight

1 in 5 surgical patients is readmitted to hospital within 30 days of leaving. Vinaya Sharma, a Rise Fellow from Canada, is building Cara, an AI-powered surgical companion that supports patients from pre-op all the way through recovery.

Congratulations, Vinaya, on reaching the semi-finals.

From classrooms to courtrooms to research labs, Equitech Futures alumni keep doing the work.

Congratulations to Isabelle Speiser (Futures ‘22, United States), Ivy Li (Futures ‘22, China), and Shamiim Namulema (Civic Tech ‘24, Uganda) on these wonderful milestones. Swipe to celebrate each of them.

Rise Innovation Fund Challenge 2026 | Semi-Finalist Spotlight

Roberto Carlos Navarro Félix, a Rise Finalist from Mexico, is turning agro-industrial waste into food for rural and peri-urban communities across Latin America. His project Fungi Mati puts mushroom cultivation kits and a free open-source AI assistant directly into the hands of those who need it most.
Congratulations, Roberto, on reaching the semi-finals.

The future of AI isn’t predetermined. It will be shaped by who we choose to include in building it.

Most conversations about AI and work focus on displacement - jobs lost, skills made redundant. But there’s a quieter, more structural crisis unfolding alongside it. Over 80% of the world’s teenagers live in Asia and Africa. By 2030, roughly 500 million of them will enter a workforce where AI is embedded in everything from agriculture to healthcare to journalism. Yet the tools, systems, and decisions shaping that future are largely being built without them, by institutions and markets concentrated in the global north.
This isn’t just a technology access gap. It’s a question of imagination. Of who gets to define what problems AI should solve, for which communities, and by whose values.

New research points to something important here: people with strong foundational problem-solving skills gain the most from AI tools, while those without them fall further behind. Which means the stakes of getting AI education right, especially in low and middle income countries, are only growing.

There are already people doing this work. Aindriya Barua, an ML engineer from India, built ShhorAI after finding that existing content moderation tools couldn’t detect hate speech in Hinglish. The dataset of 40,000+ real-world comments was built by volunteers who had personally faced that hate online. That is what it looks like when technology is shaped by the people it’s meant to serve.

Satyam Gupta, an Equitech Scholar and former teacher in India, writes from the field about what equitable AI literacy actually demands and why technological sovereignty is the real conversation we should be having.

Read the full field note on Equitech futures website - AI and the futures of work:Bridging the Global Divide

Equitech Futures is proud to congratulate Luis Castro (Applied Data ‘23, United States).
Luis is joining the Trust and Safety team at YouTube and will soon be completing his M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. It is a well deserved next chapter for someone who has worked hard to get here.
Congratulations, Luis. We cannot wait to see what you build next.

Rise Innovation Fund Challenge 2026 | Semi-Finalist Spotlight

Sophia Wang, a Rise Fellow from China and Stanford University student, is building Duomigo alongside co-founder Morteza Ehsani. Duomigo is a free, AI-driven, gamified English learning platform designed specifically for women and girls in Afghanistan, helping them prepare for the Duolingo English Test and access global education opportunities that were taken from them overnight.

Congratulations, Sophia, on reaching the semi-finals. With the finalist announcement on the horizon, we are proud to spotlight the work and dedication behind each project that made it this far.

The Rise Innovation Fund Challenge is a collaboration between Equitech Futures and Rise, a program that supports promising young people and provides them with opportunities to develop technology-driven solutions for some of society’s most pressing challenges.

Our mission is to invest in the next generation of transformative scientists and innovators and to make every opportunity as widely accessible as possible.

So today, we are excited to announce the Equitech AI for Science Challenge.

Through this challenge, candidates can secure tuition aid for the AI for Science Summer School.

Here is how it works:
🔹 Sign up for Learner Plus on FuturesHub
🔹 Complete the challenge by working with Que, our Socratic AI agent
🔹 Based on your performance and interviews, you will be eligible for full and partial tuition aid

Deadline: June 25th.

We interview on a rolling basis. Apply soon for the best chance!

Got questions? Join us live for a Q&A session!
📅 30th May 2026
⏰ 14:00 to 15:00 UTC
📍 Zoom

🔗 Links in bio!







Program Cohortbased Techandscience Aiforimpact learn better

AI didn’t break education. It just made the cracks impossible to ignore.

More than 60% of educators believe AI will make it harder to assess what students truly understand. That fear is real. But the deeper question it’s pointing to has been there for a long time.

For decades, written assignments have been asked to carry everything: grammar, clarity, critical thinking, effort, originality, all at once. That’s an impossible burden for one medium. And it quietly created something we rarely name: feedback that gravitates toward fixing sentences rather than shaping ideas.
The panic around AI in classrooms is understandable. ChatGPT and tools like it became part of how students write and think, often faster than schools could respond. But the discomfort isn’t really about cheating. It’s about a fundamental tension in how we’ve designed learning itself.

What this moment is really asking educators is whether the goal is the product or the process. Whether a polished essay is evidence of thinking, or a substitute for it. Some educators are already experimenting, asking students to submit not just a final paper but the process behind it. The drafts, the questions, the pivots. Suddenly, you can see a student think.
AI didn’t create the literacy crisis or the overstretched teacher. It just put a spotlight on all of it. And that might be the most useful thing it’s done yet.

Read the full field note by Linda Kinning on the Equitech Futures website.

Aakriti Ghimire (Futures ‘21, Nepal) has worked inside Nepal’s government, helped build Bureaucrazy alongside fellow Equitech alumni Labbi Karmacharya (Applied Data ‘23, Nepal) and Aayusha Shrestha (Futures ‘21, Nepal), and is now sharing her experience on On Air with Sanjay.

She asks the question Nepal’s youth is still sitting with: we changed the people in power, but did we change the political culture?
Watch the full conversation on YouTube.

PublicPolicy EquitechAlumni

Equitech Futures alumni keep finding their way into rooms that matter.

Stages, panels, and summits across continents. We are so proud of each of you.