WE THE PEOPLE
Supporting Digital Sprinters: How to Improve Global Internet Access
by Nancy K. Herther
For 2 years now, “countries around the world have all been victimized by the pandemic,” notes a Google-sponsored post at The Economist. “While developed nations have responded with vaccine programs and financial stimulus, resource-constrained developing countries have faced greater challenges, including a growing gap between those who are connected to the internet versus those who are not.” In the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) “Measuring Digital Development Facts and Figures 2020” report, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau, notes in the foreword that “people in rural areas continue to face greater challenges than people in urban areas in terms of remaining connected during the lockdown, especially in developing economies.” The United Nations (UN) Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development reports, “ Universal broadband access is the vital catalyst needed to drive global economic recovery. … The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly underscored humanity’s growing reliance on digital networks for business continuity, employment, education, commerce, banking, healthcare, and a whole host of other essential services. Yet today, almost half the global population has still never accessed the internet, and hundreds of millions more struggle with slow, costly and unreliable connections, often through remote locations like internet cafés.”
TAKING STEPS TO REMEDY THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
Oxford Business Group shares some success stories of helping to bridge the digital divide. For example, in Colombia, “the Vive Digital plan involved the creation of 900 free public access internet centres in rural villages. Similarly, in China the Villages Connected programme has led to the installation of broadband internet access—whether fixed, mobile or satellite—in nearly 70,000 villages across the country.” In the private sector, “since 2018, South-east Asian super app Grab has been working with Samsung to bring connectivity to under-served regions, for example by offering microfinancing to allow drivers to purchase mobile devices.” And “Microsoft’s W-GDP Microsoft Women’s Digital Inclusion Partnership, launched at the end of [2020], aims to significantly increase the number of women with internet access around the world. The programme will invest in ICT [information and communications technology] infrastructure in rural areas in Colombia, Ghana, Guatemala, India and Kenya.”
ITU, which “works in all regions of the world and develops tailored programmes to allow everyone to access and use the Internet,” partners “with governments, the private sector, civil society, academia and UN sister agencies and entities to reduce digital divides due to age, disability, gender, geography, skills and socioeconomic status,” according to its website. It participates in initiatives such as the following:
- Generation Connect—youth groups that “engage global youth and encourage their participation as equal partners alongside the leaders of today’s digital change, empowering young people with digital skills and opportunities”
- Giga—“a global initiative to connect every school and its surrounding community to the Internet, which has mapped over 800,000 schools in 30 countries”
- Global Partnership for Gender Equality in the Digital Age—a program that “seeks to reduce the gender digital divide, achieve equal access to digital technologies for women and girls, empower them with skills to become ICT creators, and promote them as ICT leaders and entrepreneurs”
- Smart Village—an initiative that “showcases how to cost-effectively accelerate the implementation of the [UN Sustainable Development Goals] in remote areas through an integrated development and technology platform model, and to drive sustainable rural development in agriculture, commerce, education, finance and health”
- Digital Transformation Centres Initiative—a program that “seeks to create a global network of centres to develop digital skills mainly at basic and intermediate [levels] for citizens” (ITU notes that this “contributes to the broader goal of building an inclusive digital society, and ensuring that lack of knowledge and skills is not a barrier to participation in the digital economy. The Initiative is currently operational in nine countries in Africa, Asia-Pacific
and Latin America.”)
ITU offers resources on ICT accessibility (online training courses, toolkits, and platforms for exchanging information) on its website. It works toward the digital inclusion of Indigenous peoples with “a series of training programmes for indigenous leaders, [which has] benefited more than 2,800 indigenous leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean.”
THE DIGITAL SPRINTERS
Google’s Economist post shares four areas that Google has identified as “key to digitally-driven economic growth in emerging markets” and that can turn developing countries into what the company calls Digital Sprinters. They are investment in physical capital; developing human capital, especially digital literacy; adopting technological innovation, including AI, machine learning, and cloud computing; and increasing the competitiveness of the regulatory and trade ecosystem. Google’s comprehensive proposal for Digital Sprinters to succeed, called “The Digital Sprinters: Driving Growth in Emerging Markets,” covers a broad range of critical components that must be met:
- Ensure affordable access to the Internet
- Foster digital skills development
- Encourage startups
- Address labor market discrimination
- Promote the adoption of Artificial Intelligence
- Promote innovative uses of data
- Encourage movement to the cloud
- Enable an inclusive payments ecosystem
- Adopt balanced competition policies
- Enable the platform economy
- Adopt tax policies for a digital economy
- Commit to open digital trade
- Advance a digital government
Google posted a message from Kent Walker, its SVP of global affairs, on its blog: “If we do nothing, it could take years for these countries to recover [from the pandemic], creating even greater divides between people in developed and emerging economies. … [I]f emerging economies adopt the right digital policies, they could actually emerge stronger and better prepared to accelerate economic growth and opportunity.”
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