The internet’s potential to spur social and economic progress remains largely untapped, despite 30 years of steady growth, according to a new report from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations specialised agency for information and communication technologies.
While the number of Internet users surged from a just a few million in the early 1990s to almost 5 billion today, 2.9 billion people – or around one third of the population – still remain totally offline, and many hundreds of millions more struggle with expensive, poor-quality access.
The report was launched to coincide with the opening of ITU’s World Telecommunication Development Conference in Kigali, Rwanda, UAE state news agency WAM reported.
“Equitable access to digital technologies isn’t just a moral responsibility, it’s essential for global prosperity and sustainability,” said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao. “We need to create the right conditions, including promoting environments conducive to investment, to break cycles of exclusion and bring digital transformation to all.”
The report advocates for putting ‘universal and meaningful connectivity’ – defined as the possibility of a safe, satisfying, enriching, productive, and affordable online experience for everyone – at the centre of global development.
“Universal, meaningful connectivity has become the global imperative for our decade,” said Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau, which produced the report. “It’s no longer just about linking people – the catalytic role of connectivity will also be absolutely critical to our success in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.”
It also evaluates how close the world is to achieving that universal and meaningful connectivity, using the connectivity targets for 2030 recently released by ITU and the Office of the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology.
The cost of broadband subscriptions and digital devices remains a major barrier to connectivity, the report confirms. While Internet access has become progressively cheaper in richer countries, getting online is still prohibitively expensive in many in low- and lower-middle-income economies.
And although the cost of broadband – especially mobile broadband – has fallen significantly over the past decade, the majority of low- and middle-income economies still fall short of the global affordability target of 2 percent or less of gross national income per capita set by the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development.
