“Technologies in Context”

Deadline: May 16, 2025

Download GHTC 2025 Call for Papers (PDF)

The 15^th IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (IEEE GHTC 2025) is a flagship international conference sharing effective approaches, best practices, and practical and/or scholarly technology-enabled interventions that address the needs of underserved communities in resource-constrained environments around the world. This year IEEE GHTC 2025 will highlight and explore “Technologies in Context” as its annual theme. This theme encourages authors to assemble diverse teams including community members articulating the need and/or desire for technology, relevant policymakers, and/or interdisciplinary academic teams to describe their technological intervention in social, cultural, environmental, economic, and/or political contexts. Submissions should discuss work done and interventions designed to address resource-constrained and/or development contexts, build local capacity, promote local involvement through decolonial and critically conscious practices, provide educational opportunities and connectivity, and/or create equitable and just access to water, energy, and food with minimal negative impact on the planet and environment.

GHTC 2025 will be hosted at Colorado School of Mines (Colorado, USA) on October 22-25, 2025.

NOTE: GHTC 2025 will be primarily in-person, there will be hybrid access for remote presenters and attendees.

Stakeholders from public and private organizations, education and research institutes, societal and government organizations, community representatives, and the funding and donor sectors are invited to submit Full Papers that share insight, experience, best practice and lessons learned from a research, policy, practitioner and/or community perspective.  Papers should present analysis of research results or a case study. Submissions including solution/intervention design and implementation, field experiences and best practices, case studies, project monitoring and evaluation results, and/or original research are all welcomed. General project descriptions or project proposals are not appropriate, however see the Oral Only option below to see if your project may be appropriate for that format.

Submissions will be assessed for quality, work done, relevance, consideration of ethical and contextual issues, methodological vigor, and potential for impact. Of particular interest are works that highlight community engagement and collaboration, long-term and sustained engagement, and the year’s conference theme. Paper submissions should include results that have not previously been published and have not been submitted to another conference or journal.

The conference is structured to provide ample opportunity and environments for extensive interaction between attendees. Including both mature research and reporting of ongoing projects provides an environment in which seasoned and new practitioners and scholars in the field alike can ask questions and share lessons learned.

Please note that all submissions will undergo a Plagiarism Check before being assigned for blind peer review by  experienced subject matter experts. Accepted papers presented by an original author or co-author during the conference will be published in the IEEE GHTC 2025 Conference Proceedings and submitted for publication in IEEE Xplore®. Accepted oral-only talks will be posted to IEEE Xplore® but will not be indexed.

IEEE GHTC 2025 Thematic areas are centered around:

• Technologies in cultural, social, political and/or economic context
• Interdisciplinary and collaborative capacity building
• Decolonial and critically conscious engineering
• Community collaboration, co-construction, and co-design
• Humanitarian engineering practice and research in higher education
• Technology to improve education, communication, and connectivity
• Technology to improve health and well-being
• Equitable and just access to water, food, and energy
• Disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery
• Technologies to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls
• Technologies to enable peace, justice, and equitable economies

IEEE GHTC 2025 Topics:

In addition to describing technological aspects, ethical and sustainability challenges, submissions are encouraged to consider socio-cultural, socio-economic, environmental and policy perspectives, and explain how holistic, development-related good practices such as skills, capacity building, community ownership, co-design, collaborative open innovation, and Theory of Change are applied.

Two types of submissions are invited for presentation at GHTC:

Full Papers: for Publication and Presentation: mature results, tested innovations, or completed projects with a minimum of 4 and should not exceed eight pages.

Oral-Only Project Talks: Up to two-page extended abstracts (can include references and visuals) which include a discussion of fieldwork or research projects in progress (with insufficient results for a full paper) that will be posted to IEEE Xplore but not indexed as a publication.

For complete details on topics and submission see the Author Central pages.

NOTE: we are also accepting proposals for multi-stakeholder Special Sessions (e.g. demo, panel, discussion; up to 8 pages)  deadline May 31. Contact Program Chair regarding submission.

Accepted Full Papers and Oral-Only Presentations will be grouped thematically to facilitate focused discussion, community building and networking based on common interests.

Important Dates

Accepted papers presented by an original author or co-author during the conference will be published in the IEEE GHTC 2025 Conference Proceedings, and submitted for publication in IEEE Xplore®

IEEE GHTC 2025 is Sponsored by IEEE Region 6, IEEE Region 5, IEEE Denver Section and IEEE SSIT, with Technical Co-Sponsorship by IEEE-USA, IEEE MTT-S, and the IEEE Smart Village Initiative.