How the PNMA Concepts Portfolio effectively contributes to the WSIS+20 Process and GDC implementation

Summary

This discussion was a special session of the Policy Network on Meaningful Access (PNMA), focusing on concepts that contribute to the WSIS plus 20 process and Global Digital Compact implementation. The session brought together experts from various organizations to address the persistent digital divide affecting 2.6 billion people worldwide who remain unconnected or inadequately connected to the internet.

The conversation emphasized that meaningful connectivity goes beyond basic access, requiring daily use, appropriate devices, unlimited affordable data, and fast connections. Speakers highlighted that current international standards defining connectivity as internet use once every three months are inadequate for 2025. Community networks emerged as a crucial solution for reaching underserved populations, particularly in rural areas of Africa, South America, and Asia where traditional operators lack commercial interest.

Several speakers discussed policy innovations, including Kenya’s community network service license and Brazil’s use of universal service funds to support local connectivity initiatives. The importance of spectrum access through “use-it-or-share-it” models was emphasized, along with the need for innovative financing mechanisms adapted to small-scale operators. Indigenous communities received special attention, with examples from Norway showing how technology can preserve native languages through natural language processing frameworks.

Gender equality was identified as critical, with women disproportionately represented among the unconnected population. Capacity building emerged as essential, with success stories like Ruth Njeri in Kenya demonstrating how local training programs can transform individuals into community network leaders. The discussion concluded with recognition that meaningful access requires comprehensive policies addressing infrastructure, affordability, digital literacy, and cultural preservation, with work continuing toward the UN General Assembly decisions later in the year.

Keypoints

## Major Discussion Points:

– **Community Networks as Solutions for Digital Divide**: Extensive discussion on how community networks serve as lifelines for connecting underserved populations, particularly in rural areas of Africa, South America, and Asia, with emphasis on local ownership and sustainable models using green energy.

– **Meaningful Connectivity vs. Basic Access**: Strong focus on moving beyond simple internet access to “meaningful connectivity” that includes daily use, appropriate devices, unlimited affordable data, and fast connections – challenging the current international standard of someone being “connected” if they use internet once every three months.

– **Policy and Regulatory Frameworks**: Discussion of enabling environments including spectrum access, universal service funds, licensing frameworks, and innovative financing mechanisms, with examples from countries like Kenya, Brazil, and South Africa that have developed community network service licenses.

– **Capacity Building and Local Empowerment**: Emphasis on training local communities to build, maintain, and expand their own networks, with examples like Internet Society’s programs training over 200 local trainers globally and reaching 70,000 people since 2021.

– **Cultural and Linguistic Preservation in Digital Spaces**: Exploration of how indigenous and minority communities can maintain their languages and cultural heritage online, including technical solutions for low-resource languages and protocols for protecting sacred cultural content.

## Overall Purpose:

The discussion aimed to advance the Policy Network on Meaningful Access (PNMA) agenda by sharing knowledge, practices, and solutions for bridging digital divides. The session was designed to contribute to the WSIS+20 process and Global Digital Compact implementation, focusing on how to ensure internet access is not just available but truly transformative for underserved communities worldwide.

## Overall Tone:

The discussion maintained a collaborative and solution-oriented tone throughout. It began with formal introductions and acknowledgments, then evolved into passionate advocacy for inclusive digital policies. The tone was consistently constructive and forward-looking, with speakers building upon each other’s points and sharing concrete examples of successful initiatives. There was a sense of urgency about the 2.6 billion people still unconnected, but the overall atmosphere remained optimistic about the potential for community-driven solutions and meaningful policy change.

Speakers

**Speakers from the provided list:**

– **Alhagie Mbow** – Co-host/Co-chair, from The Gambia, working on Joker Labs

– **Giacomo Mazzone** – Co-host/Co-chair

– **Daphnee Prates Iglesias** – Consultant working on Policy Network on Meaningful Access (PNMA)

– **Vint Cerf** – Loyal participant to IGF meetings, advocate for PNMA work

– **Poncelet Ileleji** – From The Gambia, working on Joker Labs, expert on community networks

– **Josephine Miliza** – Policy Regulator Lead, Local Network Initiatives Association for Progressive Communication (APC)

– **Borre Gaup** – Senior Engineer, DIVUN, Arctic University of Norway, expert on NLP framework for indigenous languages

– **Onica Makwakwa** – Executive Director, Global Digital Inclusion Partnership (GDIP)

– **Guilherme Canela de Souza Godoi** – Director, Division for Digital Inclusion and Policies and Digital Transformation, Secretary of Information for All Program (IFOP) at UNESCO

– **Fabio Senne** – Coordinator, Regional Center for Studies for the Development of Information Society, Research coordinator at CETIC.br

– **Joyce Dogniez** – Vice President for Empowerment and Outreach, Internet Society Foundation (ISOC Foundation)

– **Margaret Nyambura Ndungu** – Moderator

– **Judith Hellerstein** – Moderator

– **Shiva Burgos** – International representative for arts and culture for the National Cultural Commission, Papua New Guinea; Special envoy for Papua New Guinea on arts

– **Dikchya Raut** – Online moderator

– **Roberto Zambrana** – Online moderator

– **Audience** – Various audience members who asked questions

**Additional speakers:**

– **Julian Casas-Buenos** – Director of Colnodo in Colombia

– **Kunle Olorundare** – President of Internet Society in Nigeria

# Comprehensive Report: Policy Network on Meaningful Access (PNMA) Special Session

## Executive Summary

This special session of the Policy Network on Meaningful Access (PNMA) convened experts from across the globe to address the persistent digital divide affecting 2.6 billion people worldwide who remain unconnected or inadequately connected to the internet. The discussion, which formed part of the broader WSIS+20 process and Global Digital Compact implementation, brought together representatives from international organisations, community networks, regulatory bodies, and indigenous communities to examine how meaningful connectivity can be achieved beyond basic access.

The session emphasised that true digital inclusion requires moving beyond viewing connectivity as a binary state to understanding it as a spectrum of meaningful engagement. Speakers argued that current international standards, which define someone as “connected” if they use the internet once every three months, are inadequate for 2025. Instead, meaningful connectivity demands daily use, appropriate devices, unlimited affordable data, and fast connections that enable genuine participation in the digital economy and society.

## Key Participants and Their Contributions

The discussion was co-chaired by **Alhagie Mbow** and **Giacomo Mazzone**, with moderation provided by **Margaret Nyambura Ndungu** and **Judith Hellerstein**. Online moderation was facilitated by **Dikchya Raut** and **Roberto Zambrana**.

**Daphnee Prates Iglesias**, consultant working on PNMA, outlined the network’s mission to address the gap between connectivity and meaningful internet benefits. She emphasised that PNMA builds knowledge and exchanges policies across communities whilst highlighting policy failures.

**Vint Cerf** provided both historical context and forward-looking perspectives, noting his involvement in solar system internet work since 1998. He suggested that “the interplanetary extension of the internet… should be, and will become a topic for the PNMA as we ask ourselves how do the cosmonauts and astronauts get access to internet equivalent capabilities as they explore the rest of the solar system.”

## Community Networks as Essential Infrastructure

**Poncelet Ileleji** from The Gambia, working with Joker Labs, argued that community networks provide essential last-mile connectivity for the 2.6 billion unconnected people globally. He emphasised that communities should be directly involved in network setup, using citizen-generated data to identify their specific needs rather than having solutions imposed from external actors.

**Josephine Miliza**, Policy Regulator Lead at the Local Network Initiatives Association for Progressive Communication (APC), reinforced this perspective by highlighting that community networks serve rural marginalised areas where traditional operators cannot achieve commercial scale. She advocated for a diversified telecom ecosystem with solutions tailored to local contexts and needs.

**Julian Casas-Buenos** from Colnodo in Colombia shared their experience with community networks, noting their work with the European Union and emphasising the importance of international cooperation in supporting these initiatives.

The discussion revealed that community networks have proven particularly effective in rural areas of Africa, South America, and Asia, where traditional telecommunications operators lack commercial interest. These networks often operate using sustainable models incorporating green energy and local ownership structures.

## Policy and Regulatory Framework Requirements

**Josephine Miliza** highlighted several successful examples, including Kenya’s development of a community network service provider licence that enables local initiatives to scale effectively. She argued that regulators should engage in dialogue with local communities for bottom-up policy building rather than imposing top-down regulatory frameworks.

Argentina’s regulatory approach was cited as another positive example, where the regulator provided grants for community network deployment and operation. This model demonstrates how Universal Service Funds can be redirected to support community network models rather than exclusively benefiting large telecommunications operators.

The discussion emphasised the importance of spectrum access mechanisms aligned with the social nature of community initiatives. The “use-it-or-share-it” model was highlighted as promising, where existing licence holders share unused frequencies with community networks. Examples from Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa demonstrated how this approach can work in practice.

## Redefining Connectivity Standards

**Onica Makwakwa**, Executive Director of the Global Digital Inclusion Partnership (GDIP), delivered a critique of current connectivity measurement standards, observing that “in 2025, we are still sitting with an international standard that designates a person who is connected as someone who uses the internet once every three months, and I’m sure all of us here will agree with me that that’s quite an underwhelming standard.”

Makwakwa argued that meaningful connectivity requires daily use, appropriate devices, unlimited affordable data, and fast connections. This redefinition has significant implications for how progress is measured and policies are developed.

**Guilherme Canela de Souza Godoi**, Director of the Division for Digital Inclusion and Policies and Digital Transformation at UNESCO, provided context through UNESCO’s Internet Universality indicators. He offered a memorable critique of incremental approaches through an economic metaphor, referencing a Brazilian Minister of Economy who argued that “first we need to let the cake grow and then we distribute,” noting that “as you can imagine the distribution never arrived.”

**Fabio Senne**, Coordinator at the Regional Centre for Studies for the Development of Information Society and Research coordinator at CETIC.br, emphasised the need for reliable disaggregated indicators. His research in Brazil revealed stark intersectional inequalities, showing that “black women, for instance, have much less meaningful connectivity than white men.”

## Cultural Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights

**Borre Gaup**, Senior Engineer at DIVUN, Arctic University of Norway, presented his work on natural language processing frameworks for Sámi languages. His approach focuses on developing infrastructure suitable for low-resource languages with 500 to 20,000 speakers, whilst ensuring that language communities maintain full governance and control over their language resources.

**Shiva Burgos**, International representative for arts and culture for the National Cultural Commission of Papua New Guinea, provided important perspective on cultural protection in digital contexts. She emphasised that “not everything needs to be accessible online” and that “sacred sites and ceremonial practices should not be digitised or shared without proper cultural authorisation.” This highlighted the importance of cultural sovereignty and the need for mechanisms to protect traditional knowledge.

## Capacity Building and Local Empowerment

**Joyce Dogniez**, Vice President for Empowerment and Outreach at the Internet Society Foundation (ISOC Foundation), provided examples of how capacity building transforms communities through skills development. She emphasised the importance of training people who can train others to bridge connectivity gaps.

The Internet Society’s commitment was highlighted through their $30 million investment over five years for connectivity-focused initiatives targeting the hardest-to-reach populations. Success stories like **Ruth Njeri** in Kenya were cited, who went from rural Kenya to becoming lead network engineer at Tandanet, demonstrating how local training programmes can transform individuals into community network leaders.

## Gender Equality and Social Inclusion

Gender equality emerged as a critical dimension throughout the discussion. **Onica Makwakwa** highlighted that women face significant barriers to meaningful connectivity, requiring gender-responsive policies and community-led initiatives that reach women where they are.

**Fabio Senne’s** research provided concrete evidence of these disparities in Brazil, showing intersectional inequalities where black women have substantially less meaningful connectivity than white men. The discussion emphasised that digital policies must include gender targets, with speakers noting that “unmeasured progress doesn’t exist.”

## Implementation Challenges

Despite policy innovations and community network successes, speakers acknowledged significant implementation challenges. **Fabio Senne** noted that Brazil, despite having advanced digital services and good legal frameworks, still faces persistent usability and accessibility issues. He highlighted that enforcement of digital rights legislation remains inconsistent, creating gaps between policy intentions and practical outcomes.

## Future Actions and Commitments

The session concluded with clear commitments to continued action. **Giacomo Mazzone** outlined that PNMA work continues with reports due for the UN General Assembly, including a pre-version required by September. The PNMA roadmap will contribute directly to the WSIS+20 process and Global Digital Compact implementation.

The Internet Society’s substantial financial commitment of $30 million over five years provides concrete resources for implementing discussed ideas. Additionally, the launch of a study on self-sustaining financing mechanisms was scheduled for the following day’s DC3 session, indicating immediate follow-up actions to address financing challenges.

## Conclusion

This PNMA special session demonstrated the evolution of thinking around digital inclusion, moving beyond simple connectivity metrics to embrace comprehensive frameworks addressing technical, policy, financial, and cultural dimensions of meaningful access. The discussion’s scope, ranging from terrestrial community networks to interplanetary internet considerations, reflects the ambitious nature of meaningful access frameworks.

The integration of technical solutions with cultural sovereignty concerns, gender equality considerations, and indigenous rights demonstrates sophisticated understanding of digital inclusion as a multifaceted challenge. The commitment to continued work through the WSIS+20 process and Global Digital Compact implementation, supported by substantial financial commitments and concrete action plans, suggests this discussion will translate into practical outcomes.

The session reinforced that meaningful access is not merely about connecting people to the internet, but about ensuring that connectivity enables genuine participation in digital society whilst respecting cultural values, promoting equality, and supporting sustainable community development.

Alhagie Mbow: Good afternoon and welcome to this special session that is the PNMA session, which is the Policy Network on Meaningful Access. Today we will be discussing about the concepts portfolio, effectively contributing to the WSIS plus 20 and also the GDC implementation. With me today is my co-host Giacomo that we have over there and then we have a series of a wonderful panel this afternoon. And the first we have on the panel I’m going to introduce to you is Mr. Fabio Senne, who is a coordinator on the Regional Center for Studies for the Development of Information Society. Welcome, sir, to this special program. Now, the second part we have here is Ms. Onica Makwakwa, Executive Director, Global Digital Inclusion Partnership, that is GDIP. Welcome to this special panel. And after we have Mr. Guilherme Canela de Souza Godoi, Director, Division for Digital Inclusion and Policies and the Digital Transformation and Secretary of the Information for All Program, IFOP at UNESCO. Welcome to this program. And next we have Madam Joyce Dogniez, Vice President for Empowerment and Outreach, Internet Society Foundation, ISOC Foundation. You are also welcome. And from there we have our two moderators also. That’s Ms. Margaret. Welcome, Madam Margaret. And next we also have one of our moderators here is Judith Hellerstein. Welcome. Now, we move on to the next on stage here. And we have Mr. Borre Gaup, Senior Engineer, DIVUN, that’s the Arctic University of Norway. You’re welcome, sir. And we have also one of my colleagues and one of my friends here, Poncelet Ileleji. I’m from The Gambia. I’m working on the Joker Labs. And then finally, we have Madam Josephine Miliza, that’s Policy Regulator Lead, that’s Local Network Initiatives Association for Progressive Communication, that’s APC. Welcome to this special session. Now, before we continue, I would like to call our consultant and lady that has been working with us for the past several months and for the past several years, digging into all aspects of meaningful access. And we have Madam Daphnee, and she’s going to give us like a rundown of what this network is all about, that’s the Policy Network on Meaningful Access. Welcome, Daphnee, to the floor.

Daphnee Prates Iglesias: Good afternoon, good evening, and good morning. It is an honor to welcome you to the PNMA main session here in Norway and anywhere you are watching us from. The Policy Network on Meaningful Access as an intersessional activity was created in response to the growing body of evidence that even when people have connectivity, they might not fully benefit from the Internet. How one gets connected is an equally important challenge to the experience that a person will have once they are online. While access to infrastructure is critical, without this access being inclusive, useful, sustainable, and affordable, or to summarize, meaningful, humanity cannot achieve its full potential. Since 2021, the PNMA’s expert-led multi-stakeholder network has consistently built knowledge and reached across communities to exchange policies and practices that have worked within our focus areas. But most importantly, to highlight what has not worked, why digital divides persist, and which structural issues repeat themselves in different scenarios. This analysis of stakeholders’ experiences with implementation and problem-solving is notably one of our main outcomes. We invite you to access our PNMA repository of good practices, and also our endorsed list of literature on meaningful access, both available for community updates throughout the year, a community that you can also be part of and extends beyond the IGF ecosystem. Advocacy for partnered implementation of these previously identified solutions, the monitoring of ongoing experiences, and the collation of new practices are additionally performed by our network. Our roadmap towards WSIS plus 20 process highlights our core activity as a benchmark for the implementation of meaningful access objectives as established by the global digital compact. Moreover, our upcoming output report is planned as a public portfolio of knowledge and practices that the PNMA can engage with and contribute to these pivotal milestones. You are about to experience a small fraction of said portfolio. Let’s keep the conversation flowing afterwards. We look forward to receiving your support and feedback. Thank you, and enjoy the panel.

Giacomo Mazzone: Thank you. I have the computer on my knees. Thank you, Daphnee, for this introduction. The structure of the session will be as followed, as has been explained before, but let’s say that we have discussion here and then we will have remote moderators taking questions from people on remote and other moderators moderating the debate here in the room. We hope that we have a lot of discussion with you. Dikja and Roberto are the moderator online, while Niambura and Judith with us are moderator on the room. The first speaker for us is Vint Cerf, that is loyal to this meeting, but today is better than yesterday. Yesterday, the other meeting waked you up at 3 in the morning. Today is better for you a little bit.

Vint Cerf: Yes, this is much more manageable, but thank you very much for inviting me to both of them. If I may take a moment just to remind the PNMA participants how important your work is. This is the most substantive intersessional activity that I think IGF undertakes, and the reason I consider it to be so important is that we can give concrete feedback to local and regional actors about how well the internet is performing for those users in those locales. This concrete kind of feedback is exactly the sort of thing that one hopes for out of the IGF, and what is especially important is that the PNMA is an intersessional body which continues to carry out its work during the course of the year, not only in an annual meeting. I had confessed that I don’t know to what extent the PNMA measurements reflect the UNESCO Romex metrics, but I would draw those to your attention as yet another way of expressing how well or how not well internet is performing for all of its users. It’s been my belief that the national and regional internet governance fora are also potential partners to work with the PNMA in providing this concrete feedback. I also just want to briefly draw your attention to a new development which has been underway for quite some time now, and that’s the interplanetary extension of the internet. It’s the so-called solar system internet. This work began in 1998, and the reason I’m bringing it to your attention in 2025 is that the protocols for interplanetary communication have been standardized by the Consultative Committee on Space Data Systems and the Internet Engineering Task Force, and they have been exercised on the International Space Station. Prototypes have been operating on Mars to serve the rover communications between Earth and Mars since 2004. Other experiments have been done with optical communications to orbiters around the moon and to other spacecraft that NASA has made available to the community that is developing these protocols. This is actually going, should be, and will become a topic for the PNMA as we ask ourselves how do the cosmonauts and astronauts get access to internet equivalent capabilities as they explore the rest of the solar system, and of course we also want these things. and Robert Mazzone. I suspect that in 2026, if not 2025, this should become yet another work item for the PNMA as we think about interplanetary support or internet-like capability. Let me thank every single one of you for participating not only in this annual IGF, but for the persistent work that you have been doing over the course of the last several years. I believe that this work is going to make a very big difference as the Global Digital Compact framework fills in, as it’s fleshed out, with specific activities. You’ll be a key player in helping us understand how well that effort is going. So, that’s really as much as I have time to say, and I must go to another meeting. But thank you so much for allowing me to begin, and congratulations again on putting this very successful panel together. So, back to you. Thank you.

Giacomo Mazzone: Thank you, Vint. Thank you. So, if I understand, you suggest that the next revision of the GDC, we extend the rights of being connected also to extraterrestrial? This is your proposal?

Vint Cerf: They haven’t been very well represented, so thank you for taking that into account.

Giacomo Mazzone: Thank you.

Alhagie Mbow: All right. Thank you very much, Vint, once again for the words of encouragement and for the support that you keep providing to this special network. We really appreciate all the support that you are giving to us. Now, we move to our first speaker that is on-site. That’s Mr. Pons Ileleji. And, Mr. Pons, we would like you to tell us about the importance of community networks so that the followers of this session, both online and on-site, can have a better understanding about the importance of the community networks.

Poncelet Ileleji: Thank you very much, Honorable Halaje and Bob. I think one of the good things to be able to bridge this great digital divide we have in a situation whereby we have 2.6 billion of people like me and you that are not connected is through community networks. And most of these 2.6 billion people worldwide that are not connected mainly live in the global south. If I look at my continent of Africa, we have only, in a population of 1.4 billion people, we have only about 37% on broadband connectivity. That is not good enough. We still have a lot of children that are not yet being able to access any digital device at all or seeing anyone. We still have teachers that are struggling with having access to educational technologies that can aid learning outcomes. And that is where community networks come in. Community networks have been the lifeline of a lot of communities in Africa, in South America, and in Asia in being able to provide last mile connectivity and above all improve social economic development through having access to digital tools. In setting up a community network, I’m not going to look at the technical aspect. I’m going to look at a situation whereby the communities are involved in it because using a reflective mode of citizen generated data, they know their needs. They know what they want to use that community network to do. Not just accessing things that are on social media but to help maybe small scale farmers to be able to get resources on agriculture that they can use to improve their planting, to help teachers to be able to access materials. And women, especially in my beloved continent of Africa, who are in the informal sector to be able to use e-commerce tools to sell their group. And in setting up these community networks, in a lot of cases, our Internet service providers don’t play a big role. So, you have the technical aspects that come in. And my new model with the implementation phase now, the global digital compact to bridge this digital divide is our Internet service providers and our technical, our telcos, mobile network operators to be able to be involved with organizations like the LockNet that are involved in this setup to build robust and sustainable networks based on green energy. That will serve remote communities. And in that way, we can be able to bridge the digital divide and give last mile access to communities that don’t have.

Alhagie Mbow: Thank you for now. Thank you very much, Ponce, for that wonderful intervention on telling us the importance of these community networks. I’m aware it tends to bridge that gap in various countries, particularly in Africa, in South America, and also in Asia, where we still globally have over a billion people that are still under-connected. So, thank you. Then we’re going to move to the next speaker here, Ms. Josephine Miliza, to talk to us about the research for the G20 presidency on the replicability of the community networks model.

Josephine Miliza: Thank you, Honorable Alhaji, for the introduction. I work with the APC Local Networks Initiative, and we work in this initiative in partnership with Rhizomatica. And our role is to directly support the growth and emergence of community networks in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. For us, this conversation is very pivotal because we know, especially post-pandemic, there was quite an over-reliance or the demand in terms of reliance on digital infrastructure has really grown. And I remember when we started advocating for community networks back in 2016, 2017, the IGF was a pivotal platform, global platform, that we used to be able to bring this conversation to global spaces. And so, this year, South Africa holds the G20 presidency, which started in December 2024 up to November 2025. We thought that it would also be important to continue to drive the conversation around community-centered connectivity initiatives so that it can be included in the global agenda that is being advocated at the G20 process. And so, within this, I’d just like to mention some of the key things that we think are important for us to be able to scale community-centered connectivity initiatives. As Poncilet mentioned, they really operate in rural, marginalized communities where traditional operators are not able to scale, are not able to provide connectivity. And so, to be able to provide more support so that more of these initiatives come up, we recognize there’s a need to be able to promote a diversified ecosystem, recognizing that there’s no one-size-fits-all telecom approaches. There are several opportunities for local communities to be able to self-provision their infrastructure, and so support is required for them where we have regulators having dialogue with local communities to bridge and to build up our policies from the bottom up. We are seeing a lot of these examples in countries such as Kenya and Brazil, and in fact, Kenya has developed a community network service license, provider license, and this has enabled quite a number of the local initiatives to be able to scale. South Africa as well, we are seeing examples where initiatives can be able to operate under license-exempt regulations, but also their developments in terms of reviewing so that it’s more integrated in its policy and innovation. The second thing I’d like to highlight is the importance of innovative financing and investment mechanisms. As these are small-scale operators, we need to be able to adapt the financing mechanisms so that they also reflect the needs of those communities. Public funds such as the universal service funds can actually be allocated to support these models. We are seeing examples in Argentina where the regulator was able to provide grants for quite a number of community networks to deploy and operate. Brazil and Kenya have also followed suit in terms of not only recognizing community networks in their licensing framework, but going a step further to be able to create spaces within the universal service funds where they can be supported, because CAPEX is a key need, operational costs are a key need for them to be able to scale and grow. The third advocacy issue is on access to unused and underlied spectrum. In the telecom ecosystem, we hear quite a lot about scarcity or spectrum. But it’s not just about scarcity, but most of the time it’s because of inaccessibility of that particular spectrum. And as LockNet, what we actually advocate for is the use-it-or-share-it model, whereby existing licensee holders can be able to share with other operators where there are unused frequencies. And we are seeing great examples in countries such as Mexico and Brazil, and South Africa also is following suit. Lastly is on investment in terms of awareness-raising and capacity-building, and I know my colleague from Internet Society, Joyce, will speak a bit about that, on the importance of ensuring that communities are actually active contributors to the growth of digital infrastructure, and not just users or consumers of the digital infrastructure. So those are my interventions, and back to you.

Alhagie Mbow: Thank you very much, Josephine Miliza, for that rundown about some of the issues that you guys are working on, particularly the promotion of community-centered initiatives, and also the use of the Universal Service Fund to ensure that those that are not connected can also be connected, and also capacity-building. Now before I hand over to my colleague, Giacomo, we have one intervention from the floor, that is Mr. Julian Casas-Buenos, that’s the director of Colnodo in Colombia. You can take two minutes, and then we can continue the conversation. Is the mic on? Can we have the mic on? Try again. Can you hear me? No, check the button on the mic. Yeah, can you check? It’s open? Good.

Audience: Thank you for the opportunity to comment about the experience of Colnodo in community networks, and also that we have been doing with the support of LockNet project, of the Association for Progressive Communications and Internet Society Foundation. Based on Colnodo experience in supporting community networks, particularly those using mobile communications over IMT spectrum in rural areas in Colombia, it is clear that the sustainability and impact of these initiatives largely depend on the existence of clear public policies that recognize their social value and their importance in reducing the digital divide in remote rural areas. Community networks have proven to be an effective and sustainable solution for bringing connectivity to historically access, but also the strengthening of local capacities, technological autonomy, and community well-being. We consider the support of the European Union within the framework of the Global Gateway Strategy to be highly relevant for the implementation of community networks in Colombia through the project Connecting the Unconnected Community Internet Networks as a Vehicle to Reduce the Digital Divide in Rural Areas in Colombia, implemented by Colnodo. It is essential that national policies include specific mechanisms to facilitate access to spectrum under conditions aligned with the social nature of these initiatives, removing barriers such as auctions or costly license fees. Additionally, resources from the National Universe Service Fund should be made available to support the development of these networks, not only relying on the international donors promoting such initiatives, and directed not just toward basic infrastructure, but also toward training and meaningful technology appropriation processes. Connectivity should not be measured solely by technical availability, but it is a real capacity to transform lives, ensuring meaningful access means enabling communities to use the Internet in ways that are relevant, safe, and tailored to their specific needs.

Giacomo Mazzone: Thank you very much, Julian, for this contribution that integrates what we have heard before. Josephine, when will the complete study be available? This is important information for us. Do you have a timeline?

Josephine Miliza: Yes, so we would like to invite, tomorrow there will be the launch at the DC3 session, we’ll be launching the study on self-sustaining financing mechanisms, but also within the T20 process we hope that we’ll be able to publish this policy brief that we submitted.

Giacomo Mazzone: Okay, we will share the information with the people connected. So now we have seen difficulties in reaching rural areas and various kinds of communities, but we have a special kind of community with special needs, and this is, for instance, the indigenous population. And it looks like something exotic, but in Norway, where we are, we have exactly this kind of a situation, and thanks to technology, these communities are now on the way to be integrated and not cut out from the digital revolution. Borre, can you let us know better how you do it?

Borre Gaup: I work at the University of Tromso, and we have made an infrastructure for an NLP framework for making the native languages survive in the digital age. So the NLP framework is, you put in linguistic content, and then out of that you get apps. The apps are distributed on the App Store, Play Store, and widely on the Internet, and also as web apps. The infrastructure was made for Sámi languages, which have 500,000 to 20,000 speakers. So the framework or the infrastructure is a good fit for low-resource languages. The infrastructure is made such that you first make a language model, and then those are packaged into apps. Based on the maturity of your language model, then you get more and more advanced apps. They are listed in front of you here. What’s in it for a new language? Many of the technical problems are solved, and also the problem with distribution for the major platforms, at least that means iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and also Chrome OS. So what you need to begin using this framework is just start adding linguistic content into the framework. You need a native speaker which knows the language, you need a linguist, perhaps they are the one and the same, and you need a programmer to adapt the source code into the framework. If you also happen to have a text corpus, that will be a bonus, it will ease your development of the language model. We have sufficed with less than a million words, so the South Sámi text corpus is about a million words. The North Sámi, which is the largest one, has 40 million words inside it. The development process starts with making a keyboard so that it’s easy and convenient to input your language, and then you start working on the language data model. The maturity of your data model decides which apps are available. So you start, of course, with the keyboard as an input. The next step is the spellchecker, and then you get onwards and onwards with more and more. complicated apps. For text-to-speech, you need 10 hours of transcribed material, you need a language model to process the speech, and then you need access to neural network training of that model. And for automatic speech recognition, you need a hundred hours of transcribed material again, you need the language model, and you need resources for the neural network training. So, that’s it about our infrastructure. I can say that not only are the Sami languages users of this infrastructure, we also have Greenlandic, we have Faroese with 70,000 speakers, we also have various native and minority languages in the Nordic hemisphere, because we have worked there and have connections within the milieu there. So, that’s it. We also had spurious contacts with South American native communities. So, there are repositories or development going on but it’s just begun. Thank you very much.

Alhagie Mbow: So, the problem seems common across the world and across the communities, and this is exactly what Onica now will tell us. Can you tell more about that? Thank you.

Onica Makwakwa: Good day, everyone, and thank you for this opportunity. Again, my name is Onica Makwakwa, I’m the Executive Director at the Global Digital Inclusion Partnership. Our mission at GDIP is advancing meaningful connectivity for the global majority world, and this is largely motivated by the recognition that there is an even broader, larger emerging divide amongst those who are connected. So, raising the standard to go beyond just basic access to begin to address meaningful connectivity is something that is at the core of the work that we are doing. And what do we mean exactly by meaningful connectivity? There are at least four big areas that we look at when we are talking about meaningful connectivity. One is just daily use. I mean, it’s actually quite interesting that in 2025, we are still sitting with an international standard that designates a person who is connected as someone who uses the internet once every three months, and I’m sure all of us here will agree with me that that’s quite an underwhelming standard. So, daily use is a big part of being meaningfully connected. You know, having an appropriate device, at minimum a smartphone, you know, a smart device to be able to access the internet, and having access to unlimited data at affordable prices. And lastly, having a fast connection. So, the quality of the connection is actually a growing divide that we are seeing amongst those who are already connected, right? And without these, connectivity just becomes symbolic if it’s just basic. It misses the point of the transformation that we’ve been promising people they can be able to achieve once they are connected. In terms of how we implement this, we have focused on policy advocacy, data and evidence research, as well as knowledge sharing. So, let me talk a little bit about policy advocacy. It’s important that we continue to help to shape national ICT policies to use meaningful connectivity as the standard for measuring access and including gender-responsive targets in that we cannot afford to leave women behind. In that figure that 2.6 billion that Poncelet mentioned earlier, I think that if we actually looked at it from a meaningful connectivity lens, you will find that it’s actually even more people who are not adequately connected the way they should be. With regards to data and evidence, I’m going to invite you to take a look at our connected resilience report that’s on our website that really shows how important it is for us to understand and do the research so that we enable communities to be able to articulate how they are experiencing this connectivity. So, connected resilience looks at the gendered experience of women through meaningful connectivity and takes an ethnographic view of really looking at women where they are and the challenges that they face with connectivity after they have access to infrastructure, after they may or may not have access to devices. What is their experience and let us inform policies that are based on that lived experience of women. Lastly, creating knowledge sharing opportunities so that these communities are able to inform how policies are actually shaped and we can really have a global local kind of perspective in terms of bringing women along. Lastly, I just want to conclude by saying that we have to commit to supporting and funding as well as scaling community-led digital initiatives that reach women where they are. Community networks are actually a very good example of that. We must push for gender targets in digital policy because if you can’t measure it, then it just really doesn’t exist. You are not going to even know whether you are making progress or not. It’s really critical that we are intentional in putting women at the center. Lastly, we must recognize that the Internet is a public good and therefore that access cannot afford to leave anyone behind and it must be the kind of access that’s empowering to communities including women and girls. Thank you.

Alhagie Mbow: Thank you very much, Onica, for putting on the gender lenses. They’re exactly the issues that we need to do as countries as we move to bridge the gap. Essentially when you look at the unconnected, of course, you are quite right because when you look at population in many countries, particularly on the African continent, you realize that actually the other part which is women that are really not connected. So we have to go to where exactly they are in terms of policy advocacy and in terms of getting the infrastructure but also making it accessible and affordable. Thank you so much, Onica. Now we move to Mr. Guilherme Canela de Sousa to talk to us about the IFAP programs that they’ve been doing. So you have the floor.

Guilherme Canela de Souza Godoi: Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. Many decades ago, there was a Minister of Economy in Brazil and he was frequently asked about a meaningful economy and his answer was always, well first we need to let the cake grow and then we distribute. As you can imagine the distribution never arrived, right? So and people, because they are smart, they realize that they don’t want only a share of this cake. They want different cakes for celiac, for people who doesn’t eat milk or whatever it is. And not only that, they want to know what is in the cake, how the cake is made. So the question here of meaningful connectivity is really about that. We need to stop this idea that first we connect and of course the rich ones are connected first and with more quality and so on and with more protection and then we do the right thing. We can’t afford that. These need to be a parallel movement and in an integrated movement and a comprehensive policy. That’s why 20 years ago when we were having the Tunis phase of the Summit on Information Society, UNESCO published a groundbreaking report called Towards Knowledge Societies. Until today, I said this earlier, sorry for the spoiler for those who were in the previous session, until today this report is one of the most downloaded reports in the UNESCO website. And back then, 20 years ago, we were already saying those things, that we need to include multilingualism as was said here today, the gender component, information preservation, information ethics, information development, information literacy, all issues that are part of the information for all program of UNESCO. And Vansurf stole my thunder because he mentioned the UNESCO Internet universality indicators, this framework that I guess all of you know based on rights, openness, accessibility, access, multistakeholderism and all these cross-cutting elements that we are discussing here today, that were the previous speakers already mentioned, again gender and multilingualism and people with disabilities and so on. And this, as you said, is an essential tool for measuring our success or our failures, where we are. and where we must go. 40 countries from Brazil, that is a very complex country for its dimensions and so on, to small islands are using these kind of frameworks to understand how to build better policies based on evidence. Therefore, this network here is very much connected with these key principles of UNESCO in developing the information and knowledge societies since these last 20 years, but if we want to go back since the beginning of UNESCO, because our unique mandate in the United Nations system of protecting and promoting the free flow of information is about that. There is no free flow of information if we don’t have multilingualism, if women and girls are not included, if people with disabilities don’t have the means for doing that, if people that are far away for different technological reasons, they can’t be connected and included with quality. Let me finish, maybe I’m being too chauvinistic today, with another Brazilian, a very important sociologist called Bettinho, and this fantastic man used to say that we need to stop to make poor policies for poor people. Everyone deserves high quality policies, and we need to be adamant about that, because if this is not our starting point, then we’ll always be lagging behind. Well, those there, they can wait a little bit, right? After all, we are giving them zero rating, whatever, right? So, that needs to be our commitment. Everyone deserves high quality policies, and this is meaningful connectivity. Thank you.

Alhagie Mbow: Thank you very much, Guilherme, for that wonderful statement. We want a cake that everybody can have a part of. We all have to enjoy that cake, and that’s why we want to have everybody connected, but also for the connectivity to be meaningful. Thank you so much. And then we move to Mr. Fabio Senne to talk to us about the employment of Romex indicators in Brazil, so that we can have a clear idea about what’s actually happening in that area. Thank you. You’re welcome.

Fabio Senne: Thank you, Mr. Chair. It’s a pleasure to be here in this session. So, if I can summarize my intervention in one single message, it will be more or less what my colleagues already said, that to address the complex challenges that we are facing nowadays, we need reliable and disaggregate indicators and sound monitoring strategies. In particular, I work that the UNESCO Romex indicators have proven to be a useful tool to do that, to monitor the environment from a multi-stakeholder perspective, and instead of just ranking countries, I think it’s useful because it allows for creating a roadmap for action. So, it’s not just a matter of saying who is better in the situation, but what can we do from the indicators and the data we have. So, I’m a research coordinator at CETIC.br, which is a think tank linked to the Brazilian multi-stakeholder internet governance model represented by NIC.br and CGI.br, and CETIC is also a UNESCO category two center that are working along with Latin American and Portuguese speaking countries in Africa to support this type of process of building international comparable indicators. So, because of that, Brazil was the first country to pilot the implementation of the Romex indicators back in 2018, and to launch in 2019 the first report at the IGF in Berlin, and apart from collaborating with several other countries in implementing the framework, we also supported UNESCO in updating the five years revision of the Romex indicators that was launched last year in the IGF in South Arabia. So, this year, in 2025, we are updating the Brazilian assessment with the new version of the indicators. So, CETIC and NIC.br are responsible for collecting the data and providing the data, and CGI.br is our multi-stakeholder advisory board that supports the whole process. So, I’ll take some time to mention a few preliminary results of what we found in the second generation indicators. So, from the right perspective, although Brazil has a legal and consistent international standards legislation, the enforcement is still inconsistent, and we have major gaps in access to information and user protection when it comes to enforcement of those rights, and although we have a very lively debate on platform regulation and information integrity that we don’t used to have five years ago, this has not yet, we have not yet a consensus on how to regulate this and how to implement these topics. On the field of openness, we have significantly expanded digital public services online, including the idea of DPIs as the gov.br platform, but still, we have not equitable access to the services because we have usability and accessibility issues to solve. When it comes to access, it’s interesting because nowadays, universal and meaningful connectivity is getting traction in the policy debate, so now you see the government and the whole society using this term meaningful connectivity, but still, you have lots of inequalities to face. I can mention we have one indicator on meaningful connectivity in Brazil that shows that black women, for instance, have much less meaningful connectivity than white men, and we can show this in the report. From the multistakeholder participation, Brazil is recognized and we have an institutional architecture that provides a solid foundation for multistakeholder participation. I think CGI is one of these good examples, but when it comes to the details of the policies, the digital policies, you see that there is still a vulnerable population that don’t participate well in the discussions. And finally, the new IOI Bromacs indicators included new indicators on topics such as AI environmental issues, and we saw that in Brazil, although we have advanced in having an AI plan, for instance, we still don’t have any model for governance of this topic in the country, and environmental issues are overlooked in the whole digital policy discussion. So, just to conclude, I think those indicators are very useful for monitoring and for having good tools for multistakeholder participation, and also, if you see, lots of these topics are in the GDC, in the discussion of WSIS plus 20 agenda, so they are very useful for monitoring this whole discussion that we are having today. So, thank you very much. This is my comments for today.

Alhagie Mbow: Thank you very much, Fabio, for taking us through the Bromacs, where we can actually generate some indicators to also still assist in bridging that gap. Now, I would like to move to Joyce. Here we have a brand new car, but I cannot drive. So, tell us about the capacity building that we need, because access is available, quality access is affordable, but then what next? What can I do? Talk to us about capacity building.

Joyce Dogniez: Thank you so much. Thank you. Not sure I can get to the car today, but let’s see, you know. Thank you very much. So, as mentioned, I’m with the Internet Society, and over the next five years, our focus is really to connect the most difficult people to connect. So, we are looking at the hardest to reach people, indigenous communities, refugees, and women’s social enterprises. But getting people online, as we just heard, is just the first step. We also want to make sure that when people are online, they have a safe, secure, and a meaningful experience. Simply put, we basically connect the unconnected, and we protect the connected. We all know that connectivity is not just about technology or policy. It’s actually about people. So, if you allow me today, I would like you to tell you a story about a person, a young woman, based in Kenya, Ruth Njeri. Ruth, as you can see, she grew up in a rural village in Kenya, where access to technology, devices, and connectivity both, was very limited. And actually, her mom was very reluctant to let her play with technology, because she didn’t really know what it was, and so it was not a good thing to do. But Ruth was very determined, and so she found her way, and in 2022, she joined an Internet Society training program focused on designing and deploying computer networks. That led to an internship with a local community network called Tunapanda, or Tandanet now, in Kibera, in Kenya, one of the largest informal settlements in Africa. And actually, she impressed the team so much that they decided to hire her, and she is now the lead network engineer for the community network. And the journey didn’t stop there. So Ruth is also an Internet Society Early Career Fellow. She’s continuing to grow her leadership journey as she continues to work. And fast forward to today, or a couple of weeks ago, with our growing support to connect refugees, we invited Ruth to help train our trainers in Kakuma, in a refugee camp in Kenya, and in Rhino Camp refugee settlement in Uganda. Those trainers are now actively working on training other refugees, and so we hope that, well we know that, in a couple of weeks we will have 250 learners that will be trained in the camps. Ruth’s story is just one example of the many that I know we all know, we all have heard those stories, how building local capacity can really transform lives, but it can also transform communities. At the Internet Society, we believe that empowering people to take connectivity in their own hands is the best way. And Josephine already mentioned some of the challenges, or should I say opportunities, that we see with community-centered connectivity solutions. So one is, as she mentioned, financial sustainability, long-term financial sustainability. The second is a need for enabling environment and regulatory frameworks. And the one that I wanted to focus on today is capacity building, so skills competencies and the technical capacity to install, maintain, but also expand community networks. As Ponsley mentioned, and we heard Annika as well say that 2.6 billion people are still not connected to the Internet, that’s far too many for any of our organizations to connect. So this is why we focus on building the local capacity to train people who can then train others to bridge that gap. We can’t be everywhere, but people at the grassroots, in the local communities, they are. And so they understand the culture, the regulation, but also the needs of the communities, which is really, really critical. We currently work with over 20 partners in our 120 chapters across all regions, and we built a global network of over 200 local trainers, and by the end of 2025, we will have reached over 70,000 people with our trainings since 2021. So a couple of examples that we had was Citel in Latin America, we did some work in Zimbabwe. Now the largest 2.6 billion are the hardest to connect, as I said. If they weren’t, we would have connected them already. The reality is that many of these communities are in rural areas where there’s little commercial interest for traditional operators, so we need to work together, we need to bring all stakeholders together. This is also why we launched the connectivity co-funding initiative, to help us reach our goal of ensuring that connectivity is really for everyone, everywhere, and it’s affordable and reliable and resilient. Over the next five years, the Internet Society and the Internet Society Foundation have committed to invest $30 million in connectivity-focused initiatives, and we’re actively looking for partners who will join us in connecting the last people, and hopefully build that big cake that we can then provide to everyone. Thank you.

Giacomo Mazzone: Thank you. Thank you very much, Joyce. Very interesting information shared with us. And about projects that are challenging and try to bring connectivity, meaningful connectivity, we have now the next speaker online with us that will talk exactly about that. Ms. Shiva Burgos, can you explain what you are working on now?

Shiva Burgos: Hello, thank you for the opportunity to speak with such an esteemed panel, and I’m glad that I’m speaking last, because everyone has already outlined several of the common challenges that we have with solutions. So I really appreciate the expertise that’s been brought forward, and also how we might benefit from it from our part of the world, which is Oceania, which is often forgotten in all these global conversations. So I could say that I’m an artist, so my background is formally trained in art. I’m also a curator, and at the moment I’m working in Papua New Guinea as the international representative for arts and culture for the National Cultural Commission, and also with the Prime Minister as his special envoy for Papua New Guinea on arts. So we can influence how policy might be shaped in this area, and I think that’s from a perspective of cultural heritage protection, it’s essential, because we’ve already brought up ideas about infrastructure and access. In Papua New Guinea we have over 800 language communities at risk, so also the digital divide, and the most vulnerable people that can be excluded. It’s also important to think about what is accessible online, and not everything needs to be. And so there are models for protecting sacred and culturally sensitive content. For example, in Australia there are content warnings where blurred images and clear warning signs require user confirmation. Also we need sophisticated mechanisms and protocols that recognize the traditional knowledge. Sacred sites and ceremonial practices should not be digitized or shared without proper cultural authorization, and there we have to invite tribal leaders and the communities to make these decisions about how cultural custodians can have a veto power of what’s available for the wider public, or also within the small communities. And there’s also the issue of the dominance of Western technology companies, and that approach which is seen globally can threaten cultural sovereignty and economic independence, and create a dangerous precedent for cultural preservation when aspirations and values come from another source rather than from within. So I would say that our Honorable Prime Minister has noted that to forever preserve Papua New Guinea arts in a world that is now getting more globalized through ICT and real-time transactions, for example through our recent art interventions at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, it’s a big step to secure the family of humanity. And indeed our recent lunar landing, if we’re talking about space, that was on March 2nd, and so collaborating with LifeShip, where digital archives of culture are protected onto microfiche and binary code, and now contain cultural heritage of artworks and practices of Sipic River people. So our projects reflect an indigenous worldview that sees art and heritage as living, sacred presences, relational, entwined with identity, and the museum itself can be transformed into a living space, sharing voices, shared stewardship, and we’re also extending this through an exhibition project and platform called OneBell, which unites digital exhibitions and resources from the world’s great collections of Papua New Guinea art, and that gets shared back to source communities via public display, and developing our digital archives for the nation. So this case study can be scaled to communities worldwide. So cultural heritage, tangible, intangible, how do we store and preserve this? How do we transmit back to source communities? Control access, how can oceanic countries access your programs, policies, and resources? And we think that culture is not something we put away in museums or hidden in books, that it lives within us, and it needs to be shared for future generations to know where they came from and who they want to be. Thank you.

Giacomo Mazzone: Thank you very much, Shiva, that’s a very interesting example that you bring to us. I remember that we already spoke some years ago about what was happening in Papua New Guinea. So now I hand over for the minutes remaining to the room first, and then to the online moderator. So please, Margaret and Judith.

Margaret Nyambura Ndungu: Many thanks to all the panelists for the insightful discussions, and to all the participants both online and on-site. We are now going to open forum, open discussions, where we’ll be answering questions and answers. For those who are on-site, please introduce yourself by telling us your name and organization. Be very concise with your questions, and state who you are directing the question to where possible, and we’ll kindly ask you to be next to the mic. We are going to start with the insights from our online participants. And I’ll start with Dikchya. Kindly highlights from the online participants, the questions, if any, and any other insights that is happening online. Over to you, Dikchya.

Dikchya Raut: Thank you, Nyambura. So there are some pretty interesting conversations happening online. Also, everyone is engaging with the resources that is being shared about the speakers’ role and their work. So there is a question from Joseph. This is directed to Joyce, but also everyone. She says, I admire your pathway to connect everyone, though what about having a seed in every community? An example, a community learning and living lab, and then extend to community networks. She also has another question, so maybe I can hand it over to Roberto.

Roberto Zambrana: Thank you, Dikchya. The other question is, what about participation, and what is your pathway to talk in natural language to the internet and get information that is specified for you and your community? I think those are the two questions that we have, and yeah, we come back to you.

Alhagie Mbow: Thank you, Dikchya. Thank you, Roberto. Over to you, Joyce.

Joyce Dogniez: Thank you. One of the ways in which we actually want to work is to actually work through local hubs, and so the way, as I mentioned, that we work for capacity building in particular, is to work through our local chapters, but not only through the local chapters, also actually work with local partners, local training institutions, local TVETs, and in some cases also innovation hubs, where we know that when we bring the capacity to the rural areas, and we actually bring the training capacity to the rural areas, that is really where we see the difference. For example, the training we are currently running in in Rhino Camp, for example, refugee settlement, is the first time that they actually have a managed, we trained trainers there, we trained, so Ruth, as you saw her on the pictures, she trained trainers in the camp, and so they now have the training capacity locally, which makes a huge difference, because not only are they training in the local context, in many cases, and I’m kind of bleeding into the second question as well, in terms of languages, is that they are able to actually train in the local language. Ruth was using, for example, the content that is available in the the content in English, many of the technical words are in English, however, she was actually training in Kiswahili, and so this is really where we see the impact at a local level, and why local training capacity is really, really important to reach the hardest to reach in the more remote areas. I hope that answered the question.

Judith Hellerstein: Thank you so much for the answers to the online questions, now is the opportunity for the people on the floor, if you have any other questions, so there’s an open mic on the stand over there, so if you want to come up and ask your questions, we can have one or two questions for anyone. In the meantime, there was a question for Borja, you can answer. Yes, and in the meantime, Borja will answer the question.

Borre Gaup: Yes, so the language resources and the language resources that are developed by the language communities are fully governed and controlled by themselves, also the corpora that is collected, you could divide it into a free part and a bound part, where the free part is is downloadable by anyone, and the bound part you give a license to those that need access to those things, and then the whole thing is, the infrastructure is mostly open source, so we get to cooperate and find the needs that we have, and try to cover the needs of the language communities.

Judith Hellerstein: Thank you so much, we have a question from the floor, remember to please state your name and your organization and who you’re directing a question to.

Audience: All right, thank you very much, my name is Kunle Olorundare, I’m from Nigeria and I’m the president of Internet Society in Nigeria. Internet Society is into advocacy within the IG ecosystem, so to say, and of course sometimes we deal with issues that has to do with community networks, so I appreciate the conversation we are having today, and my contribution or my comment has to do with, yes, I agree that we need to get to the unconnected, and yes, they need to have access to the internet, however I think it’s high time we advance the conversation beyond that, we need to be looking at they in the community having what we can define as meaningful connectivity, and what I mean by meaningful connectivity is that they should have the kind of access that those people in the urban areas are having, so we should have something like that in the village, however it may not be ubiquitous, ubiquitous in the sense that each and every person in the rural area should have that, so it could be like a center, just like the ISOC lady mentioned, you know, community network, but it should be meaningful, they should be able to do everything there, even at the community center, and of course I’m thinking we also start to look at the issue of the language, because for those people in the villages, the fact remains that some of them may not be able to speak English, or maybe some of these national, international languages we’re talking about, so they should be able to have access in such a way that they can use their language, and that is when they are going to appreciate this connectivity we are talking about, so I think we need to have a conversation at that level. Thank you very much.

Judith Hellerstein: Oh yeah, so Onica, you want to answer that?

Onica Makwakwa: Yes, I totally agree with that, you know, one of the things I mentioned is the emerging inequality amongst the connected, and I think the issue of being able to address the unconnected, but also improving the standard for those who are connected from basic to meaningful connectivity is really critical for us to be able to talk about digital technologies as transformative. Thank you, that’s what I’m saying.

Judith Hellerstein: Thanks so much, it seems we have one more online question, so Dikchya Raut, Roberto, will you summarize the question for us?

Roberto Zambrana: Thank you, we can go ahead with this next question, it’s for Shiba, could you please share more content details on how the project ambitions the projection of the data of these communities online in practice? Yes, that question is for Shiba.

Shiva Burgos: Okay, if I think that I understand the question correctly, how does it work practically? Well, those are always evolving situations, and as Judith knows, it’s the land of the unexpected, so from the small village that I represent, Mariwai, which is, has no electricity, so we don’t have real internet connection, and if the wind is in the right way, or the sun has lit up the solar panel, you might get a connection to WhatsApp or Facebook, so what we have to do is bring in, like we have a film festival, so we bring in content from wherever, and it’s based on batteries, so we have to get solar, and then in terms of the One Bell Project, to bring about the content from around the world, we have different venues, for example, like concerts and arenas, the National Arts Exhibition, and that can spread around through universities and online, so people that do have access to, occasionally, they’ll still store it in their devices, and then share it back in their villages. All right, I hope I answered.

Alhagie Mbow: Thank you, thank you very much. It’s unfortunate that we have to draw the curtains here, as we are running out of time, but I just want to take this opportunity, as the co-chair, to thank each and every one of you, both online and on-site, for attending such a wonderful discussion on meaningful access, particularly to our, you know, on-site participants here, from Pons, from Josephine, Borup, and also Judith, Margaret, for assisting us, Joyce, Marguleme, and then Onica, and Mr. Senne, thank you all very much for attending, so I’ll give my co-chair to give the last word, and thank you

Giacomo Mazzone: all very much. Yeah, thank you. It’s a pity that we cannot discuss a little bit more, but the most important is that the work doesn’t finish here, as you know, this year the IGF was anticipated, because we need to prepare documents and substance for the decision that will be taken at the end of the year, at the United Nations General Assembly, so our report will be done in time for for November, but I just met the facilitators that they asked for a pre-version of the report in September so that they can insert in their conclusion and recommendation to the General Assembly. So the work is not finished. Those that are committed to this scope, please continue to stay tuned with us. We need your help for the months to come. Thank you very much again.

Agreement points

Community networks are essential for bridging the digital divide and serving underserved populations

Community networks provide last-mile connectivity for 2.6 billion unconnected people globally

Community networks serve rural marginalized areas where traditional operators cannot scale

Community networks proven effective for bringing connectivity to historically excluded rural areas

Focus on training people who can train others to bridge connectivity gaps

All speakers agree that community networks fill a critical gap by providing connectivity to rural and marginalized communities that traditional operators cannot or will not serve, particularly the 2.6 billion people who remain unconnected globally.

Development | Digital access | Infrastructure

Need for supportive policy frameworks and regulatory environments for community networks

Regulators should engage in dialogue with local communities for bottom-up policy building

Kenya developed community network service provider license enabling local initiatives to scale

Need for clear public policies recognizing social value of community networks

National policies should include spectrum access mechanisms aligned with social nature of initiatives

Speakers consistently emphasize that community networks require enabling regulatory frameworks, including appropriate licensing, spectrum access, and policies that recognize their social value rather than treating them like commercial operators.

Legal and regulatory | Development | Digital access

Universal Service Funds should support community networks and capacity building

Universal Service Funds should be allocated to support community network models

Argentina’s regulator provided grants for community networks deployment and operation

Resources should support not just infrastructure but training and technology appropriation processes

There is agreement that Universal Service Funds should be redirected to support community networks, including both infrastructure development and capacity building, with Argentina cited as a successful example.

Economic | Development | Legal and regulatory

Current connectivity standards are inadequate and meaningful connectivity requires higher standards

Current international standard of internet use once every three months is inadequate

Meaningful connectivity requires daily use, appropriate devices, unlimited affordable data, and fast connections

Rural communities need meaningful connectivity centers where people can access full internet capabilities

Speakers agree that existing connectivity standards are insufficient and that meaningful connectivity requires daily use, appropriate devices, affordable unlimited data, and quality connections rather than basic access.

Development | Digital access

Local capacity building and community involvement are essential for sustainable connectivity

Communities should be involved in network setup using citizen-generated data to identify their needs

Building local capacity transforms lives and communities through skills development

Local trainers understand culture, regulation, and community needs better than external actors

All speakers emphasize that sustainable connectivity solutions require local capacity building, community involvement in design and implementation, and training programs that reflect local needs and cultural contexts.

Development | Capacity development | Sociocultural

Need for reliable indicators and monitoring frameworks to measure progress

PNMA provides concrete feedback on internet performance for local and regional actors

UNESCO Internet Universality indicators provide framework for measuring success based on rights and accessibility

Need reliable disaggregated indicators and sound monitoring strategies for complex challenges

Speakers agree on the importance of robust measurement frameworks like UNESCO’s Internet Universality indicators and PNMA’s feedback mechanisms to monitor progress and inform evidence-based policy making.

Development | Legal and regulatory | Digital access

Similar viewpoints

Both speakers highlight significant gender and intersectional inequalities in digital access, with specific evidence showing that women, particularly women of color, face disproportionate barriers to meaningful connectivity.

Women face significant barriers in meaningful connectivity requiring gender-responsive policies

Black women in Brazil have much less meaningful connectivity than white men

Human rights | Gender rights online | Development

Both speakers emphasize the importance of community control and cultural sovereignty over digital content, ensuring that indigenous and minority communities maintain authority over how their cultural and linguistic heritage is digitized and shared.

Language communities maintain full governance and control over their language resources

Traditional knowledge and ceremonial practices require proper cultural authorization before sharing

Sociocultural | Cultural diversity | Human rights principles

Both speakers reject the approach of providing substandard solutions to underserved populations, arguing instead that all communities deserve high-quality digital infrastructure and services equivalent to what is available in urban areas.

Need to stop making poor policies for poor people – everyone deserves high-quality policies

Rural communities need meaningful connectivity centers where people can access full internet capabilities

Human rights | Development | Legal and regulatory

Both speakers recognize that traditional financing models are inadequate for community-scale connectivity initiatives and that new funding mechanisms and dedicated investment are needed to support these smaller operators.

Need for innovative financing mechanisms adapted to small-scale operators

Internet Society commits $30 million over five years for connectivity-focused initiatives

Development | Economic | Digital access

Unexpected consensus

Interplanetary internet as future PNMA consideration

Interplanetary internet extension should become future PNMA work item

It was unexpected to see discussion of space-based internet connectivity in a session focused on terrestrial digital divides. However, this reflects the comprehensive nature of meaningful access considerations and the forward-thinking approach of the PNMA network in considering all forms of connectivity challenges.

Infrastructure | Critical internet resources

Cultural sovereignty in digital spaces

Language communities maintain full governance and control over their language resources

Western technology company dominance threatens cultural sovereignty and economic independence

The strong consensus on cultural sovereignty and community control over digital content was notable, as it represents a shift from purely technical connectivity discussions to broader questions of digital rights and cultural preservation in the digital age.

Sociocultural | Cultural diversity | Human rights principles

Overall assessment

Summary

The speakers demonstrated remarkable consensus across multiple dimensions of meaningful connectivity, including the inadequacy of current standards, the importance of community networks, the need for supportive policies and financing, and the critical role of local capacity building. There was also strong agreement on the need for robust measurement frameworks and the importance of cultural sovereignty in digital spaces.

Consensus level

High level of consensus with complementary perspectives rather than conflicting viewpoints. The speakers built upon each other’s arguments to create a comprehensive framework for meaningful connectivity that addresses technical, policy, financial, and social dimensions. This strong consensus suggests a mature understanding of the challenges and a shared vision for solutions, which has positive implications for coordinated action and policy development in the meaningful access space.

Different viewpoints

Scope of what should be digitized and made accessible online

Not everything needs to be accessible online, and there are models for protecting sacred and culturally sensitive content

General push for universal connectivity and digital access

While most speakers advocate for broad digital access and connectivity, Shiva Burgos emphasizes that not all content should be digitized or made accessible online, particularly sacred and culturally sensitive materials that require cultural authorization

Sociocultural | Cultural diversity | Human rights principles

Approach to measuring and defining connectivity standards

Current international standard of internet use once every three months is inadequate

Meaningful connectivity requires daily use, appropriate devices, unlimited affordable data, and fast connections

Onica challenges existing international connectivity standards as inadequate, advocating for much higher meaningful connectivity standards versus the current minimal requirements

Development | Digital access

Unexpected differences

Digital preservation versus cultural protection

Traditional knowledge and ceremonial practices require proper cultural authorization before sharing

Language communities maintain full governance and control over their language resources

While both work with indigenous communities, they have different approaches to digital preservation. Borre advocates for open-source infrastructure with community control, while Shiva emphasizes restricting access and requiring cultural authorization, representing a tension between digital preservation and cultural protection

Sociocultural | Cultural diversity | Human rights principles

Overall assessment

Summary

The discussion showed remarkable consensus on the need for meaningful connectivity and community-centered approaches, with disagreements primarily around implementation details and cultural considerations

Disagreement level

Low to moderate disagreement level. Most speakers aligned on core goals of bridging the digital divide through community networks, capacity building, and inclusive policies. The main tensions were around cultural sovereignty versus digital access, and standards for measuring connectivity. These disagreements reflect important nuances in implementation rather than fundamental philosophical differences, suggesting a mature field with shared values but diverse approaches to achieving common goals.

Partial agreements

Similar viewpoints

Both speakers highlight significant gender and intersectional inequalities in digital access, with specific evidence showing that women, particularly women of color, face disproportionate barriers to meaningful connectivity.

Women face significant barriers in meaningful connectivity requiring gender-responsive policies

Black women in Brazil have much less meaningful connectivity than white men

Human rights | Gender rights online | Development

Both speakers emphasize the importance of community control and cultural sovereignty over digital content, ensuring that indigenous and minority communities maintain authority over how their cultural and linguistic heritage is digitized and shared.

Language communities maintain full governance and control over their language resources

Traditional knowledge and ceremonial practices require proper cultural authorization before sharing

Sociocultural | Cultural diversity | Human rights principles

Both speakers reject the approach of providing substandard solutions to underserved populations, arguing instead that all communities deserve high-quality digital infrastructure and services equivalent to what is available in urban areas.

Need to stop making poor policies for poor people – everyone deserves high-quality policies

Rural communities need meaningful connectivity centers where people can access full internet capabilities

Human rights | Development | Legal and regulatory

Both speakers recognize that traditional financing models are inadequate for community-scale connectivity initiatives and that new funding mechanisms and dedicated investment are needed to support these smaller operators.

Need for innovative financing mechanisms adapted to small-scale operators

Internet Society commits $30 million over five years for connectivity-focused initiatives

Development | Economic | Digital access

Key takeaways

The Policy Network on Meaningful Access (PNMA) serves as the most substantive intersessional IGF activity, providing concrete feedback on internet performance and continuing work year-round beyond annual meetings

Community networks are essential for bridging the digital divide, particularly for the 2.6 billion unconnected people globally, by providing last-mile connectivity in rural and marginalized areas where traditional operators cannot scale

Meaningful connectivity requires moving beyond basic access to include daily use, appropriate devices, unlimited affordable data, and fast connections – the current international standard of internet use once every three months is inadequate

Policy frameworks must be inclusive and bottom-up, with regulators engaging local communities, enabling spectrum access, and utilizing Universal Service Funds to support community network models

Gender inclusion is critical as women, particularly in developing countries, face significant barriers to meaningful connectivity and require targeted policies and community-led initiatives

Indigenous and minority language preservation in the digital age requires specialized frameworks and community control over cultural content and language resources

Capacity building through local trainers who understand community culture and needs is more effective than external approaches for sustainable connectivity solutions

High-quality policies should be developed for all communities rather than creating ‘poor policies for poor people’ – everyone deserves meaningful access to digital opportunities

Resolutions and action items

PNMA will produce a report by November for the UN General Assembly with a pre-version required by September for facilitators to include in their recommendations

PNMA roadmap will contribute to WSIS+20 process and Global Digital Compact implementation through their knowledge portfolio

Internet Society commits $30 million over five years for connectivity-focused initiatives targeting the hardest to reach populations

Launch of study on self-sustaining financing mechanisms scheduled for DC3 session the following day

Brazil updating their UNESCO ROAM-X indicators assessment with the new version of indicators in 2025

Continued work needed from committed participants to support PNMA activities leading up to November UN General Assembly decisions

Unresolved issues

How to achieve long-term financial sustainability for community networks beyond initial funding and grants

Enforcement gaps in digital rights legislation despite having good legal frameworks in place

Inconsistent access to digital public services due to ongoing usability and accessibility issues

Limited participation of vulnerable populations in digital policy discussions despite multistakeholder frameworks

Lack of governance models for AI and overlooked environmental issues in digital policy discussions

How to scale community-centered connectivity initiatives globally while maintaining local control and cultural sensitivity

Balancing cultural sovereignty with digital inclusion, particularly regarding what content should and should not be digitized

Addressing the emerging inequality among those already connected who lack meaningful connectivity

Suggested compromises

Use-it-or-share-it model for spectrum access where existing license holders share unused frequencies with community networks

Hybrid approach combining traditional operators with community networks and technical organizations for robust sustainable networks

Graduated app availability based on language model maturity for indigenous language preservation

Community centers providing meaningful connectivity where ubiquitous individual access is not feasible

Blended content approach with free and licensed portions for cultural materials, allowing community control over sensitive content

Multi-stakeholder partnerships bringing together regulators, communities, technical experts, and funding organizations

Parallel rather than sequential approach to connectivity and quality – developing comprehensive policies that address both access and meaningful use simultaneously

Vint Cerf’s introduction of interplanetary internet: ‘I also just want to briefly draw your attention to a new development which has been underway for quite some time now, and that’s the interplanetary extension of the internet. It’s the so-called solar system internet… This is actually going, should be, and will become a topic for the PNMA as we ask ourselves how do the cosmonauts and astronauts get access to internet equivalent capabilities as they explore the rest of the solar system.’

Speaker

Vint Cerf

Reason

This comment was profoundly thought-provoking because it expanded the entire framework of meaningful access beyond terrestrial boundaries, challenging participants to think about digital inclusion on a cosmic scale. It reframed the discussion from addressing earthbound digital divides to considering universal connectivity in its most literal sense.

Impact

This comment immediately shifted the conversation’s scope and ambition level. Giacomo’s follow-up question about extending GDC rights to ‘extraterrestrials’ showed how this perspective challenged conventional thinking about digital rights and inclusion. It set a tone of expansive thinking that influenced subsequent discussions about reaching the ‘hardest to connect’ populations.

Guilherme’s cake metaphor critique: ‘Many decades ago, there was a Minister of Economy in Brazil… his answer was always, well first we need to let the cake grow and then we distribute. As you can imagine the distribution never arrived… We need to stop this idea that first we connect and of course the rich ones are connected first and with more quality… These need to be a parallel movement and an integrated movement and a comprehensive policy.’

Speaker

Guilherme Canela de Souza Godoi

Reason

This metaphor brilliantly deconstructed the flawed logic of ‘connect first, make meaningful later’ approaches. It challenged the fundamental assumption that basic connectivity should precede quality connectivity, arguing instead for simultaneous, equitable development.

Impact

This comment fundamentally reframed how participants discussed connectivity priorities. It influenced subsequent speakers to emphasize quality and meaningfulness from the outset rather than as secondary considerations. The metaphor became a touchstone that other speakers referenced, with the final speaker (Giacomo) returning to the ‘big cake that we can then provide to everyone’ concept.

Onica’s redefinition of connectivity standards: ‘It’s actually quite interesting that in 2025, we are still sitting with an international standard that designates a person who is connected as someone who uses the internet once every three months, and I’m sure all of us here will agree with me that that’s quite an underwhelming standard.’

Speaker

Onica Makwakwa

Reason

This comment exposed the absurdity of current measurement standards and highlighted how inadequate metrics perpetuate the illusion of progress while masking real digital divides. It challenged the entire foundation of how we measure digital inclusion success.

Impact

This observation shifted the discussion toward more rigorous standards for meaningful connectivity. It influenced subsequent speakers to emphasize quality metrics over quantity, and reinforced the need for daily use, appropriate devices, unlimited data, and fast connections as minimum standards rather than aspirational goals.

Shiva’s cultural sovereignty perspective: ‘It’s also important to think about what is accessible online, and not everything needs to be… Sacred sites and ceremonial practices should not be digitized or shared without proper cultural authorization… there are models for protecting sacred and culturally sensitive content.’

Speaker

Shiva Burgos

Reason

This comment introduced a crucial counterpoint to the prevailing ‘connect everything’ narrative by asserting that meaningful access must include the right to digital privacy and cultural protection. It challenged the assumption that digitization and online access are universally beneficial.

Impact

This perspective added critical nuance to the discussion by introducing the concept of selective connectivity and cultural sovereignty. It expanded the conversation beyond technical and economic barriers to include cultural and spiritual considerations, showing that meaningful access must respect indigenous worldviews and traditional knowledge systems.

Fabio’s intersectional inequality data: ‘We have one indicator on meaningful connectivity in Brazil that shows that black women, for instance, have much less meaningful connectivity than white men, and we can show this in the report.’

Speaker

Fabio Senne

Reason

This comment provided concrete evidence of how digital divides intersect with existing social inequalities, moving the discussion from abstract concepts to measurable disparities. It demonstrated how meaningful access analysis must account for intersectional identities.

Impact

This data point reinforced earlier calls for gender-responsive policies and disaggregated data collection. It provided empirical support for the theoretical frameworks discussed by other speakers and emphasized the importance of evidence-based policy making in addressing digital inequalities.

Overall assessment

These key comments fundamentally elevated and expanded the discussion beyond conventional approaches to digital inclusion. Vint Cerf’s interplanetary perspective set an ambitious tone that encouraged expansive thinking, while Guilherme’s economic metaphor provided a powerful framework for critiquing incremental approaches to connectivity. Onica’s exposure of inadequate measurement standards challenged participants to demand higher benchmarks, and Shiva’s cultural sovereignty perspective introduced essential considerations about selective digitization and indigenous rights. Fabio’s intersectional data grounded these theoretical discussions in measurable realities. Together, these comments transformed what could have been a routine policy discussion into a sophisticated examination of power, equity, culture, and measurement in digital inclusion. They created a cascading effect where each insight built upon previous ones, ultimately producing a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of what ‘meaningful access’ truly requires in practice.

How do the PNMA measurements reflect the UNESCO ROAM-X metrics and what is the extent of alignment between these frameworks?

Speaker

Vint Cerf

Explanation

Vint Cerf explicitly stated he didn’t know to what extent PNMA measurements reflect UNESCO ROAM-X metrics, suggesting this comparison needs investigation to understand how different measurement frameworks align

How should interplanetary internet capabilities become a work item for PNMA as space exploration expands?

Speaker

Vint Cerf

Explanation

Vint Cerf suggested that by 2025-2026, interplanetary internet support should become a PNMA work item, requiring research into how astronauts and cosmonauts will access internet-equivalent capabilities in space

When will the complete study on community networks replicability for G20 presidency be available?

Speaker

Giacomo Mazzone

Explanation

Giacomo asked for a timeline on when the complete study would be available, indicating need for follow-up on publication schedules and access to research findings

How can the use-it-or-share-it spectrum model be implemented more widely across different countries?

Speaker

Josephine Miliza

Explanation

While examples from Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa were mentioned, there’s a need to research how this spectrum sharing model can be replicated in other regulatory environments

How can Universal Service Funds be better adapted to support community networks across different national contexts?

Speaker

Josephine Miliza

Explanation

Examples from Argentina, Brazil, and Kenya were mentioned, but further research is needed on how to adapt USF mechanisms for small-scale community network operators in various countries

What are the specific mechanisms needed to facilitate access to spectrum for community networks under conditions aligned with their social nature?

Speaker

Julian Casas-Buenos (Audience)

Explanation

The speaker emphasized the need for specific policy mechanisms that remove barriers like costly license fees for community networks, requiring further policy research

How can meaningful connectivity be measured more effectively if the current standard of ‘using internet once every three months’ is inadequate?

Speaker

Onica Makwakwa

Explanation

The current international standard was criticized as underwhelming, indicating need for research into better measurement frameworks for meaningful connectivity

What is the actual number of people lacking meaningful connectivity when applying higher standards than basic access?

Speaker

Onica Makwakwa

Explanation

Onica suggested that the 2.6 billion figure for unconnected people would be even higher if measured against meaningful connectivity standards, requiring research to quantify this gap

How can sophisticated mechanisms and protocols be developed to protect sacred and culturally sensitive content in digital spaces?

Speaker

Shiva Burgos

Explanation

The need for cultural authorization systems and community control over digital content was raised, requiring research into technical and governance mechanisms for cultural protection

How can oceanic countries better access connectivity programs, policies, and resources?

Speaker

Shiva Burgos

Explanation

Shiva noted that Oceania is often forgotten in global conversations, indicating need for research into how remote island nations can better participate in global connectivity initiatives

How can community learning and living labs serve as seeds for extending community networks?

Speaker

Joseph (Online participant)

Explanation

An online participant suggested exploring community labs as foundation points for network expansion, requiring research into this model’s effectiveness and implementation

What pathways exist for communities to interact with the internet in natural language and receive community-specific information?

Speaker

Online participant (via Roberto)

Explanation

This question addresses the need for more intuitive, localized internet interfaces, requiring research into natural language processing and community-specific content delivery