Building on UNICEF's decade of bringing connectivity to emerging markets, the collaboration now extends that reach to compute - enabling sovereign AI use cases from citizens-first access to advanced models to guaranteed AI allowances for schools, clinics, and local businesses.

GENEVA, [August 11], 2026 — UNICEF Digital Inclusion, the Connect and Compute Foundation, and Self Labs today announced a strategic collaboration to help governments in emerging markets deliver sovereign AI capacity and Universal Basic Compute (UBC), an allowance of AI compute for citizens, schools, health clinics, and local businesses, particularly those that support the welfare of children.

More than two billion people remain offline, and far more lack access to the computing power that modern AI tools require. Without deliberate action, the AI era risks widening the digital divide it should be closing. The collaboration addresses this directly: UNICEF’s Digital Inclusion team contributes a decade of supporting governments in their internet connectivity strategies now and works across the 190 countries that UNICEF is present in. The Connect and Compute Foundation operates the credits marketplace that channels digital infrastructure resources to local SME internet and compute providers who can distribute to underserved populations, in support of work being done by UNICEF and Giga (a UNICEF and ITU partnership). Self Labs provides the privacy-preserving identity layer that ensures each allowance reaches a real, unique person or institution, making universal programs possible without fraud and without surveillance. In education settings, Self’s age proofs gate age-appropriate AI tools without collecting any child data, in line with best practices on online child protection. 

UNICEF supports governments to build infrastructure that delivers results for children, including internet and compute access.  The Connect and Compute Foundation will run the layer to verify that digital resources  are available, and Self will verify that each allowance reaches an actual real person.

• Source – Human Development Report 2025

The partners will jointly work with governments and other partners to prototype national UBC programs and be a thought partner to governments on sovereign AI strategy more broadly. The first pilot country will be announced in September 2026, with a live program delivering AI access to verified users beginning in Q4 2026.

This collaboration builds on Self Labs' deepening work at the intersection of digital identity and artificial intelligence. Recently, Self launched its Sovereign workspace that lets governments and organizations enforce verified-human access and eligibility policies for AI systems without ever collecting or storing personal data. Purpose-built for the agentic web, this workspace uses zero-knowledge proofs to power a new class of sovereign AI use cases: citizens-first access to advanced models, fair allocation of compute on a per-person rather than per-account basis, verified-human training and evaluation pipelines that keep synthetic identities out of labeling, RLHF, and red-teaming, and a reliable way to distinguish human requests from agent requests while preserving accountability. This is the same infrastructure - proven across 180+ countries and through integrations with partners including Google and Opera - that will underpin the delivery of Universal Basic Compute, ensuring that every allowance of AI capacity reaches a real, eligible person, privately and at national scale.

Without fair, affordable, and safe access to compute – both inference and local models – we will see advances in “the connected world” that will leave more poor people, particularly children, without a sense of opportunity in, or choice about, their futures.

— Christopher Fabian, Lead, UNICEF Digital Inclusion

Access to AI – just like digital money, telecommunications, or roads – will drive local economic growth and its delivery should be tied to social impact requirements. We are working with UNICEF and others to build the  open source software and marketplace for that impact measurement.

— Mario Leoni, CEO, Connect and Compute Foundation

Sovereign AI is no longer a talking point - it's the reality governments have to plan for. We're proud to partner with UNICEF and the Connect and Compute Foundation to help them get it right: giving nations a way to put their citizens first e.g. by delivering Universal Basic Compute (UBC) to every person, privately and at national scale.

— Rene Reinsberg, CEO, Self Labs

About the partners

UNICEF Digital Inclusion works with governments to close the digital divide for children — spanning all digital networks such as connectivity, spectrum, and compute for child-facing institutions such as schools, hospitals, and post offices.

Connect and Compute Foundation is an independent Swiss foundation that will operate a neutral marketplace of connectivity and compute credits channeling funding to local service providers in underserved markets.

Self Labs builds the identity infrastructure for the AI era. Its zero-knowledge Sovereign workspace lets governments enforce verified-human, eligibility-based access to AI - from citizens-first model access to fair per-person compute - without ever collecting personal data, powering fair AI distribution at national scale.

Media contacts

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