WS #484 Innovative Regulatory Strategies to Digital Inclusion

Summary

This workshop discussion focused on innovative regulatory policy and business strategies for achieving equitable digital inclusion, particularly in developing countries and Africa. The session was organized under South Africa’s G20 presidency, building on previous work by Brazil that developed the concept of “meaningful connectivity” beyond basic internet access. The panelists identified that the primary barriers to digital inclusion are demand-side constraints rather than supply-side infrastructure issues, with device affordability being the biggest obstacle to internet access, followed by digital literacy and skills gaps.

The discussion revealed that despite high mobile broadband coverage in many African countries (above 95% in some cases), actual connectivity rates remain below 20%, indicating that coverage alone does not solve the digital divide. Panelists emphasized that 90% of unconnected people live in areas with existing coverage but face other barriers to access. The conversation highlighted how digital technologies amplify existing inequalities, creating multiple tiers of connectivity from the unconnected to those with minimal access to those who can meaningfully participate in the digital economy.

Solutions discussed included reducing regulatory barriers for small operators and community networks, implementing wholesale access regulation to lower backhaul costs, developing innovative device financing schemes, and creating comprehensive digital skills training programs. The panelists stressed the importance of intermediaries like libraries and post offices in supporting digital inclusion, and the need for diverse, locally-relevant solutions rather than one-size-fits-all approaches. The discussion concluded with calls for a fundamental shift from treating people as consumers in a market-driven system to recognizing digital access as a public good and citizen right, requiring cross-sectoral collaboration and whole-of-society approaches to address the underlying structural inequalities that perpetuate digital exclusion.

Keypoints

## Major Discussion Points:

– **The Digital Divide is More Complex Than Just Connectivity**: The discussion reveals that 90% of unconnected people actually live in areas with mobile broadband coverage, indicating the problem isn’t infrastructure but rather affordability, digital skills, and meaningful usage barriers.

– **Device Affordability as the Primary Barrier**: Research shows that for the poorest 20% in sub-Saharan Africa, an entry-level internet-enabled device costs 99% of average monthly income, making device cost the biggest obstacle to internet access rather than data costs.

– **Need for Diverse Ecosystem Solutions Beyond Traditional Operators**: The conversation emphasizes moving from a “few big stones” approach (large mobile operators) to enabling smaller, community-based networks, social enterprises, and alternative business models that can serve “uneconomic” areas.

– **Regulatory and Policy Failures in Addressing Demand-Side Constraints**: Discussion of how current regulatory frameworks focus too heavily on supply-side solutions while neglecting demand-side interventions, wholesale access regulation, and the need for treating digital resources as public goods.

– **Systemic Inequalities Amplified by Digital Technologies**: The panel addresses how digital technologies layer over existing structural inequalities (education, income, gender, rural/urban divides) and amplify rather than reduce these disparities, requiring holistic cross-sectoral approaches.

## Overall Purpose:

This workshop aimed to examine innovative regulatory policies and business strategies for achieving equitable digital inclusion, building on G20 work under South Africa’s presidency. The goal was to shift the global conversation from purely connectivity-focused solutions to addressing the complex demand-side barriers that prevent meaningful internet usage, even where coverage exists.

## Overall Tone:

The discussion maintained a collaborative and solution-oriented tone throughout, with experts building on each other’s insights rather than debating. The tone was analytical and evidence-based, with participants sharing research findings and practical examples. There was an underlying sense of urgency about addressing digital inequalities, particularly given lessons from the pandemic, but the conversation remained constructive and forward-looking, emphasizing the need for systemic change and innovative approaches to digital inclusion.

Speakers

**Speakers from the provided list:**

– **Alison Gillwald** – Workshop moderator, works with Research ICT Africa as knowledge partner to the South African government for the G20, focusing on digital inequality and equitable digital inclusion

– **Carlos Rey-Moreno** – From the Association for Progressive Communication (APC), works on digital inequality, connectivity, inclusion, and community networks, with focus on social enterprises

– **Claire Sibthorpe** – Works with GSMA, specifically in mobile for development and inclusive development, focusing on mobile internet connectivity and digital inclusion

– **Steve Song** – From the Internet Society (previously worked with Mozilla), expert in telecommunications, internet infrastructure, and connectivity solutions

– **Dr Gillian Marcelle** – Independent consultant, extensive experience working across Africa in mobile telephony, policy and regulatory initiatives for universal access, advising operators and regulators

– **Sophie Maddens** – Works with the ITU (International Telecommunication Union), involved with the World Development Telecommunications Conference, focuses on regulatory issues and digital inclusion

– **Audience** – Multiple audience members who asked questions and participated in the discussion

**Additional speakers:**

– **Leandro Navarro** – From eReuse initiative and APC, works on device reuse and refurbishment for digital inclusion

– **Kevin Hernandez** – Works at the Universal Postal Union (UN organization for postal sector), focuses on connecting intermediaries for digital inclusion

– **Peter** – Online moderator/facilitator managing remote participants and questions

– **Leslie** – Technical support person managing online connections

– **Ramune** – Online participant who commented about libraries as intermediaries (mentioned indirectly through Peter)

# Workshop Report: Innovative Regulatory Policy and Business Strategies for Equitable Digital Inclusion

## Executive Summary

This workshop, conducted under South Africa’s G20 presidency, brought together leading experts to examine innovative approaches to achieving equitable digital inclusion. The discussion revealed a fundamental shift in understanding the digital divide, moving beyond traditional infrastructure-focused solutions to address complex demand-side barriers that prevent meaningful internet usage even where coverage exists.

The panel identified that whilst mobile broadband coverage reaches above 95% in many African countries, actual connectivity rates remain below 20%, indicating that most unconnected people live in areas with existing coverage but face other barriers to access. This finding challenges conventional approaches and highlights the need for comprehensive solutions addressing device affordability, digital literacy, and systemic inequalities.

## Key Participants

**Alison Gillwald** from Research ICT Africa moderated the session, bringing experience as knowledge partner to the South African government for G20 initiatives. **Sophie Maddens** from the International Telecommunication Union provided regulatory perspectives, whilst **Claire Sibthorpe** from GSMA offered mobile industry insights. **Steve Song** from the Internet Society contributed telecommunications infrastructure expertise, **Dr. Gillian Marcelle** brought independent consulting experience, and **Carlos Rey-Moreno** from the Association for Progressive Communication represented civil society perspectives on community networks.

Additional contributions came from **Leandro Navarro** on device reuse initiatives, **Kevin Hernandez** from the Universal Postal Union on intermediary organisations, and audience members who enriched the discussion.

## Redefining Digital Exclusion

### Beyond Basic Connectivity

**Sophie Maddens** highlighted that 2.6 billion people remain unconnected to the internet, with persistent divides across rural/urban, income, gender, and age demographics. However, **Alison Gillwald** argued that when meaningful connectivity standards are applied—requiring quality, availability, affordability, devices, skills, and security—the number of truly digitally excluded people approaches 4-4.5 billion.

Gillwald explained that meaningful connectivity, building on previous G20 work, requires that people have safe, enriching, and productive online experiences at affordable costs, not merely minimal broadband connections. Under South Africa’s G20 presidency, this framework has been extended to include digital financial transactions, security awareness, data protection, government services access, and digital identity.

### The Plateau Effect

**Steve Song** identified a critical challenge: internet access growth is plateauing as the telecommunications industry has “connected the easy parts,” leaving billions requiring fundamentally different approaches. **Claire Sibthorpe** reinforced this analysis, noting that 90% of unconnected people live in areas with mobile broadband coverage but face other barriers to usage.

## Primary Barriers to Digital Inclusion

### Device Affordability as the Dominant Constraint

The panel reached strong consensus that device affordability represents the primary barrier to internet access. **Claire Sibthorpe** presented evidence that for the poorest 20% in sub-Saharan Africa, an entry-level internet-enabled device costs 99% of average monthly income, making device acquisition practically impossible for the most vulnerable populations.

**Alison Gillwald** expanded on this challenge, explaining that even when people acquire devices, they often can only use them for basic functions rather than for business or productive purposes due to both affordability constraints and digital literacy gaps.

### Education and Digital Literacy

**Sibthorpe** identified digital literacy as the second major barrier, closely linked to device affordability in creating compound barriers to access. **Gillwald** provided crucial context by explaining that the main determinants of internet access correlate with education level, which in turn correlates with income and employment opportunities.

This reveals the systemic nature of digital exclusion, where existing inequalities in education and economic opportunity directly translate into digital disadvantage. **Sibthorpe** emphasised that digital skills training must be tailored to mobile devices since those are what people actually use.

### Regulatory and Market Structure Challenges

**Steve Song** argued that current regulatory frameworks focus too heavily on competition policy without adequately addressing inclusion strategies. **Alison Gillwald** provided specific evidence of regulatory failures, noting that market reviews and dominance assessments have barely been conducted on the African continent, missing opportunities for wholesale access regulation that could significantly reduce costs.

The discussion revealed significant regulatory barriers that prevent smaller operators and community networks from entering markets. **Carlos Rey-Moreno** highlighted the vast differences in regulatory requirements across countries, with many African countries imposing high transaction costs that effectively exclude community-based solutions.

## Alternative Models and Solutions

### Community Networks and Social Enterprises

**Carlos Rey-Moreno** presented community networks and social enterprises as crucial alternatives to traditional operator models. These organisations are driven by socially motivated intentions rather than purely commercial objectives, enabling them to serve populations that are economically unviable for traditional operators.

Rey-Moreno emphasised the difference between “transactional” and “transformational” services, arguing that social enterprises provide transformational connectivity that creates local value and addresses community-specific needs through circular economies that maintain money locally.

### Ecosystem Diversity

**Steve Song** introduced a compelling ecological metaphor, arguing that telecommunications ecosystems need diversity like healthy forests, with protection for small operators and encouragement of different business models. This diversity is essential because large mobile network operators, whilst successful in their market segments, cannot economically serve all populations and areas.

### Capacity Building and Local Ownership

**Steve Song** argued for building capacity for communities to create, understand, and control their own network infrastructure, referencing Richard Feynman’s principle that “what I cannot create, I cannot understand.” He warned of the risk that without local ownership, communities become further entrenched as consumers rather than empowered as citizens.

### Intermediary Organisations

**Kevin Hernandez** highlighted the critical role of intermediary organisations such as libraries, post offices, and community centres in supporting digital inclusion. He described UPU initiatives to connect every post office to the internet and leverage postal networks for digital inclusion, demonstrating systematic approaches to supporting intermediary organisations.

## Current Implementation Efforts

Several panellists described ongoing initiatives demonstrating practical progress:

**Sophie Maddens** reported that the ITU has launched the first course in Africa for technical promoters at the community level, focusing on capacity building for local network development.

**Claire Sibthorpe** described GSMA’s mobile internet skills training toolkit, which has trained 75 million people across 40 countries, demonstrating the potential for scaling digital literacy interventions.

**Leandro Navarro** introduced device refurbishment and circular economy approaches as potential solutions to device affordability challenges, connecting unused devices with people who need them.

## Fundamental Tensions and Disagreements

### Systemic vs. Technical Solutions

A fundamental disagreement emerged between **Dr. Gillian Marcelle’s** call for addressing the “extractive economic system” as the root cause of digital exclusion and other speakers’ focus on technical, regulatory, and capacity-building solutions within existing frameworks. Marcelle argued that the shift toward deregulation 25 years ago fundamentally changed how telecommunications policy treats people—as consumers in a market rather than citizens with communication rights.

### Measurement Challenges

The disagreement between traditional metrics citing 2.6 billion unconnected people versus meaningful connectivity definitions suggesting 4-4.5 billion people lack adequate digital inclusion highlights fundamental measurement challenges that could undermine policy coordination and resource allocation.

## Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration

**Claire Sibthorpe** emphasised that addressing digital inclusion requires multi-stakeholder collaboration across sectors, as no single entity can solve these challenges alone. **Sophie Maddens** reinforced this perspective, advocating for cross-sectoral collaboration and whole-of-society approaches that integrate digital inclusion with broader development objectives.

The panel grappled with defining appropriate government roles in digital inclusion whilst supporting community-based solutions, acknowledging the tension between state responsibility and community empowerment.

## Unresolved Challenges

Several critical challenges remain unresolved:

– **Scaling Community Solutions**: Moving from small pilot projects to systematic interventions that can address digital inclusion at population level

– **Regulatory Implementation**: Reducing high regulatory transaction costs whilst maintaining quality and security standards

– **Financing Innovation**: Developing financing models specifically designed for smaller operators and social enterprises

– **Wholesale Access Regulation**: Implementing market reviews and wholesale access regulation to reduce dominance and increase competition

## Conclusion

This workshop revealed the complexity and urgency of achieving equitable digital inclusion. **Alison Gillwald’s** closing observation highlighted that “we are not going to be any better off than we were, where the last pandemic put the majority of Africans at risk who were unable to digitally substitute both for the health risk and of course the economic risks associated with lockdowns,” underscoring the life-and-death consequences of digital exclusion.

The discussion demonstrated strong consensus on the inadequacy of current approaches whilst revealing significant disagreements about solutions. The shift from viewing digital exclusion as primarily an infrastructure problem to recognising it as a complex challenge involving device affordability, digital literacy, regulatory barriers, and systemic inequalities represents a fundamental reframing of the issue.

The panel’s emphasis on ecosystem diversity, community ownership, and transformational rather than merely transactional approaches to connectivity suggests that achieving equitable digital inclusion will require innovative policies, financing mechanisms, and collaborative approaches that go well beyond traditional telecommunications sector interventions.

Most significantly, the discussion highlighted the tension between treating people as consumers in a market-driven system versus recognising them as citizens with rights to communication and digital participation. Resolving this tension may be crucial for developing sustainable, equitable approaches to digital inclusion that can address the needs of billions who currently lack meaningful connectivity.

Alison Gillwald: Thank you very much. This is the workshop on Innovative Regulatory Policy Business Strategies to Digital Inclusion, workshop 484. Sorry, we’re just doing a sound test before we start. Want to talk? Hello, hello. Hi. Hello. More, more, more, more, more. Okay.

Carlos Rey-Moreno: Hello. My name is Carlos. I’m very happy to be in Oslo. Okay. Cool.

Claire Sibthorpe: Hi, my name is Claire.

Alison Gillwald: Okay. Good. Right. Good morning, everyone. For those of you who’ve just joined us and are planning to be part of this roundtable discussion, which it is meant to be, please feel free to come up and join the roundtable so that we can involve you in the discussion. If others of you are here for other reasons, of course, please carry on, but for those of you who’d like to come up here and join us, please do. Right. Okay. Well, we’ll start this session, and perhaps just a little bit by way of background is that this session really and I’m going to be talking about the work that’s been done in the context of the G20 under the South Africa’s presidency, which has one of the core pillars, which is being focused on the Digital Economy Working Group, is on equitable digital inclusion. And this very much builds on the previous G20 work done under Brazil, which looked at extending conceptions and measuring meaningful connectivity as developed by the Broadband Commission and the Digital Cooperation Roadmap work that was done, which was looking at issues very much of affordability in addition to universal access at a period of time. And then, of course, the meaningful connectivity as developed by the ITU and CETIC for the Brazilian G20 presidency was very much looking at what you required besides a sort of minimal broadband connection. And so the concept of meaningful connectivity included for, in the Brazilian case, issues of quality, issues of affordability, and then also some acknowledgement from the really extraordinary demand side work that CETIC does across Latin America, but particularly in Brazil, some of the issues of the kind of digital skills, the basic skills that you would need in order to be able to meaningfully access the Internet. So under the South African G20 presidency, the concept of meaningful connectivity has been extended to include some of those out-of-scope factors that the meaningful connectivity work done under the Brazilian presidency was looking at. And those really included what people did online, which are very extensively covered in the African After Access Surveys done by Research ICT Africa. and who is a knowledge partner to the South African government for the G20 and is working with the ITU on extending this conception under the presidency. So there we’re looking at some of the Brazil out of scope issues which include limitations on people’s ability to transact financially. So issues around… Are you able to hear? Are you able to hear? Okay. Issues around being able to, for example, digital inclusion, to transact digitally online, able to be aware of some of the security threats that might exist online, able to effectively protect your data, those kinds of things. So we look at a lot more things than just the connectivity issues, whether you’re able to access government services, whether you have digital ID. It’s a very extensive beyond connectivity survey, although it fulfills all the requirements of the ITU international standards standardization. So the important part of this complementary aspect to that was saying, despite the evidence that we’ve had of these primary demand side constraints, which are attached to affordability, but are not limited only to affordability issues, especially when you’re talking about digital inclusion, not simply connectivity. So the results of the data, both in Brazil and in Southeast Asia, where it’s been done with partners at Learn Asia and across Africa, shows that the main barrier to accessing the internet is the cost of the device. Okay, so that’s within a whole regulatory business model, that cost of that device, as it currently is, and currently regulated, etc., is unaffordable to the majority of Africans. And in fact, little chance of it being affordable under existing conditions. for a lot of the population. The barriers then for data, which are often made as barriers to access, but the barriers to use are then the price of data. But the main barrier is the price of the device. And there are many things one could do to reduce that device, but the question is whether it could be enough to be affordable. But more importantly, what we see is that when even people when people are online or have access to a device, they are unable to use that device very meaningfully. So for example, in our micro enterprise surveys, we see that although a number of people in the South African case, for example, not all across Africa, actually have a smart device, they’re only able to use it for or they only use it for WhatsApp, they’re unable to use this whole array of small business apps that now exist, for example. And so I think the important part of this is that the because these surveys are nationally representative, and we can model them, we can see that the main drivers of internet access and use, the main determinant of whether you’re going to have access and how you’re going to be able to use it, the intensity of use, the scope of use correlates with education. So your level of education, which correlates with income, of course, employment and income, will determine whether you have access to the internet, and the degree to which you’re able to use it meaningfully, or effectively, or optimally. And certainly, whether you can use it for not just transacting that, but for purposes of production or well being of your home, etc. So the main issue that’s been presented with the ongoing work by multilateral organisations within the Broadband Commission and across the UN, is that there is still a focus in addressing the digital divide on issues of connectivity. Current projects is very, very large, multi million euro projects underway that are trying to establish what existing investment is needed to ensure that the last 8% of the population, only 8% of the population aren’t under current mobile broadband coverage. And so the challenge for us is that we’ve got least developed countries throughout Africa, Rwanda, Uganda, Mozambique with above 95% coverage, some of them 99% coverage, and yet they have less than 20% connectivity. So the challenges for many countries is not a supply side challenge, and I am talking just about digital inclusion, so basic level. Of course those economies need to be able to develop 4G and 5G, all sorts of other business things, but in terms of addressing the inclusion problem, some of our challenges have been that we continue to look at costing 4G, 5G infrastructure that’s needed to get universal coverage at a global level, when in fact we could be getting reasonably meaningful connectivity, even at 3G, but arguably 4G, and we have that across many countries, but people are unable, nevertheless, despite having coverage, to use the internet. They either cannot afford it, or they do not have the educational skills to use it meaningfully, and even very often you’re beyond quite basically. So what we are trying with this initiative under the G20, South Africa’s G20 presidency, is to say let’s respond to this now quite large-scale global south evidence that the primary constraints on internet access are demand-side constraints, and start shifting the discussion on the digital divide from a purely connectivity discussion with possibly a little bit of digital skills, digital literacy. That is not going to be sufficient to systemically move countries towards digital equality. So shifting this discussion purely from a connectivity debate to a non-connectivity debate. to actually saying, how do we firstly identify digital inequality, how do we measure it, and what are the policy responses that we need to redress it? And I think this is the sort of fundamental digital equality paradox, this wicked policy problem that we’ve been facing, that the Global Digital Compact tries to address, that multiple rounds of the G20 under India, Brazil, and South Africa’s developing country economies are trying to address, is that actually as we layer these new technologies over existing structural and other inequalities, we are actually amplifying those inequalities. And unlike the old voice and text kind of environment, where one knew that one was doing that between the connected and the unconnected, it’s not only between the connected and unconnected, of course it’s there, but it’s also between those who are barely connected, who are on tiny bits of data, really not meaningfully connected, and those who are able to transact effectively and participate in the economy, seeing as this is a digital economy working group focus, and then of course those who are able to produce using these technologies. So with that longer than intended introduction, let me turn to our panellists here, and of course our wonderful panellists online, which I shall hopefully, are still online, and should have introduced much earlier on, but in the room here we have Carlos Rey Moreno, who is from the APC, from the Association for Progressive Communication, but worked along intersections with various other NPOs over many years in the area of digital inequality and connectivity and inclusion and community networks specifically, but he’s going to talk about new developments around social enterprises today. And then we also have Clare Sipthorpe, who is with the GSMA, and particularly the mobile for development, inclusive development component of that, is going to speak to us about GSMA’s long-standing work in this area and then we’ve got online Steve Song I’m now from the Internet Society I think many of you might have know Steve very well from Mozilla and various other things before and then we also have Dr Gillian Marcelle Marcelle who is joining us I think from from Germany today but usually not and not there who’s a independent consultant but I think many of us will will be known to many of us as working extensively across Africa especially in the very exciting early days of mobile mobile telephony actually initially and then it’s all happened so fast and then of course very much involved with the policy and regulatory initiatives towards getting universal access both at the in within multilateral organizations but also technically advising operators and regulators across the continent so a very exciting team which is finally we’ve joined by Sophie Maddens who works with the ITU and has been very involved with the World Development Telecommunications Conference which you could also update us on who’ve also been preoccupied with the kind of extensive demands on regulators and you know the extended mandates that they’re facing with these rapidly diversifying technologies and the demands that are arising from those so I think we are just going to start off with Sophie telling us a little bit about what the ITU is doing in this area I think she has also been tracking what we’ve been doing within the G20 with the ITU

Sophie Maddens: Thank you, Alison, and good morning everybody, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are in the world. Alison, if you permit, I’m going to build on your introductory statements, because really you set the scene in a perfect manner, because we all see how digital has and continues to impact all sector and aspects of our lives. So think of e-health, e-agriculture, e-education and e-government services, innovation opportunities for value creation and the skills needed for adoption and the infrastructure for access, because it’s really about access adoption and value creation. That’s what the digital transformation is all about. But we still have 2.6 billion people not connected to the internet. So there is and must be a sense of urgency with all these people still unconnected. And that really is the core of our work, really that sense of urgency to connect the unconnected, but also to make sure that everybody has a meaningful experience through the connectivity. Our concern is as well that the digital divide still persists in many areas, rural areas, urban areas, across income, across gender, across age groups, and there are deep new divides that have emerged for vulnerable groups. So really addressing that demand side is key, because the challenge, it’s not just one of infrastructure development. And of course, as ITU, we work on infrastructure development, but expanding that connectivity is not enough because having access or being online are not sufficient to benefit fully from the connectivity. And today we see deep divides. So we see the risk of creating a multi-speed digital world, as you yourself mentioned, Allison. And so the fear is that a privileged few, those equipped with infrastructure, with skills, with the resources, with the expensive devices, that they are the ones that drive and benefit from AI innovation, while marginalized or vulnerable communities and groups are left behind. And so that’s why that universal and meaningful connectivity, it’s important to consider and address that. And how do we define it? It’s enabling everyone to enjoy a safe, enriching and productive online experience at an affordable cost. It does not mean everybody must be connected all the time, but it describes a situation, as you said, Allison, where anyone can access the internet, but optimally, affordably, whenever and wherever they need. And that also must be an objective of digital policy. So as you said, UMC is built on six interdependent dimensions, quality of the connection, availability for use, affordability of devices, skills and security. And each of these dimensions contribute to that meaningful digital experience and strength, and one cannot compensate for weakness in the other. So UMC has and must continue to be a vital policy objective. And let me highlight one issue here. Data is key to the success of this policy objective, because you cannot fix what you do not know. Achieving UMC also requires a holistic strategy. So we think of infrastructure development, but also policy frameworks, education initiatives, and of course, the multi-stakeholder engagement. And let’s go even further to ensure that no one is left behind, which brings me to digital inclusion, which is that holistic, intersectional approach. are all working together to build a digitally inclusive world for all, regardless of age, gender, ability or geographic location. And that’s why we at ITU are keen to share best practices, foster regional and global collaboration, so that together we can build those inclusive societies, economies and environments. And we provide assistance to our membership to formulate, implement and promote ICT policies and strategies for digital inclusion. And we also work to empower diverse groups, including youth, women and girls, particularly in rural, remote, underserved and unserved areas and communities, but also including older persons like myself, persons with disabilities and persons with specific needs, and of course indigenous people and communities. That to reduce the digital divide and enable everyone to actively participate in the digital world. I’ll leave it at that for now and come back with more thoughts.

Alison Gillwald: Thank you very much for that, Sophie. And we’ll move on to Steve Song to talk about it, just reminding us that in this round we just want to identify what exactly the problem is, your take on what those problems are, and then we’ll move to solutions in the next round. And then also just to, again, invite the audience who want to participate on the roundtable and post questions or just listen closer by, please do feel free to come up and join the conversation. Steve, over to you.

Steve Song: Thanks, Alison. I think we exist at a particularly critical point at the moment in that with two conflicting trends. One is that the growth of access is plateauing, right? And that is… you know, the reason for that is that we’ve connected the parts that are easy and, you know, affordable to connect and that the people can, you know, there’s a business model to sustain connectivity there. The remaining 2.9 billion are going to require a different approach. At the same time, you know, as you mentioned, Alison, you know, telecommunications and the internet is a force multiplier. It’s an amplifier. And so those 2.9 billion people who are unconnected are falling further behind all the time as those with access actually, you know, profit from the benefits of access. So having a strategy now that focuses on the inclusion of everyone is absolutely critical. And I think this points to regulatory issues where we’ve been focused on, you know, promoting competition. Well, that’s still extremely important, but we need to now go beyond competition and have strategies for inclusion. And the existing models, which have been extraordinarily successful to date, especially mobile networks and their growth, you know, remain a tremendously important mechanism for providing affordable access. But there’s limits to how far they can go and what they can do and whether their business models are viable in the most challenging parts of the world. And the way I like to describe this is, you know, if you think of connectivity as a jar you’re trying to fill, you know, in every country there are typically, you know, two or three or four mobile network operators and they’re like stones you’re trying to fit into that jar. And you can fit, you know, three or maybe four stones in that jar and the jar looks full. But, in fact, if you fill that jar with water, still more than 50% of it remains empty. And what is needed now is regulation that actually accommodates those smaller operators, those differently shaped operators, whether they are municipalities or cooperatives or non-profits or national research and education networks that can fill in those shapes in different ways. Another way of explaining this is to say, you know, you think of it like forest management, you know, monocultures have historically been extraordinarily unsuccessful, very vulnerable and not the way to create a healthy ecosystem. In a healthy ecosystem, we want to protect small plants and new growth to create diversity in the ecosystem. And we need to do the same thing with telecommunications and the internet. We need to protect small operators and encourage their growth so that they create different business models, they challenge affordability paradigms and they go where large operators don’t necessarily want to go. I’ll stop there. Thank you.

Alison Gillwald: Thank you so much for that, Steve. I’ve been biting my tongue trying to, since Sophie spoke, to just urge you to look at the paper where we do, applying the universal meaningful connectivity conception, not even our own more extended equitable digital inclusion conception, point out that that 2.6 unconnected in terms of basic connectivity as previously described, in terms of the application of meaningful connectivity, which the G20 under Brazil very courageously looked at Brazil and their universal access figure previously, their internet penetration figures previously above 80%. when they applied the Meaningful Connectivity formula went right down to 20%. So, using again the same extrapolation, yes, 2.6 people unconnected and, as Sophie points out, such bad data that those could be out by, you know, several hundred thousand, possibly millions. But that’s another part of that we are also trying to promote. But that the figure more like the people who are really not digitally included, substantively digitally included, is much closer to 4, you know, 4 billion or 4.5 billion in terms of that definition that we’ve used before and that we are now using in the South African G20 process. So, it’s getting those unconnected but also those not meaningfully connected online. So, Claire, perhaps if you’d come in there because Steve has mentioned some of the limitations, but despite the success of the mobile operators, especially on the African continent, there are some limitations now in reaching those so-called uneconomic areas or subscribers.

Claire Sibthorpe: Yeah, thanks so much, Alison. And I’m going to talk about, you know, obviously from the mobile perspective because that’s, you know, mobile is the primary way most people and often only way most people access the internet. And I think, you know, we also do these country national representative surveys like Research ICT Africa and find exactly the same things as you’re finding. And if we look at the problem, so if in terms of mobile internet, if 57% of the world is now connected to mobile internet, of the unconnected, if you break it down, there’s only 4% who don’t live in areas without coverage, mobile broadband coverage. So, the majority of those, so 39%, which is 90% of the unconnected, live in areas where there’s covered, but they can’t use it. So, if 90% of the people who are not connected, it’s not a coverage issue. It’s the fact that they have other face, other barriers to using it. And the people who are unconnected, and I think we’ve mentioned, it’s been mentioned already, it’s predominantly people in rural areas, people lowering… lower education, lower income, women, people, persons with disabilities. So we, for example, just published our latest mobile gender gap report, which shows that women in low and middle income countries are 14% less likely than men to use the internet. And in fact, that gender gap has stalled. So we’re not seeing, you know, a great deal of progress in that regard. But in our surveys, we look at, you know, why, why are they, why are people not using the internet or not getting online? And then once they’re online, why are they only using it in these very limited ways, as you said? And, you know, our research has similar findings to you. So the biggest barrier to getting online is the affordability of a device. And you mentioned it, you know, also about how it’s, it’s challenging. And I think if you, you know, I was, I’m always struck by the number from Africa, if you, you know, in our analysis, we looked at if you are in the poorest 20% of people living in Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa, you’re, it’s costing 99% of your average monthly income to buy an entry level internet enabled device. So these are, this is a very significant problem that, you know, needs a lot of thought in terms of how to address it. It’s not an easy solution. The other top, there’s two top barriers to getting online is the affordability of device. And the second is literacy and digital skills. And then once people go online, we ask people, what’s stopping you from using it more? Why is it this sort of limited? And in our research, it’s showing again, safety and security concerns become a big issue, affordability, but more of data at this point also emerges. So, you know, we have to, we have to look at the barriers around affordability, skills, relevance of, you know, relevant content and services, safety and security issues. If we’re really going to move the needle and we’re really going to get people online, not just online, but using it to help meet their life, life needs. And it’s sort of, it’s that usage gap. It’s that, that really is where we need to be focusing our efforts to, to really move the needle. And, and like you, it’s, you know, segments like women who are are you know lower income lower education are disproportionately affecting but we’ve also done you know some analysis that looked at if you held um you know the same women and men of the same income education levels you know there would still be for example a gender gap because things like social norms and and these other factors also play so if you’re wanting to you have to consider you know these structural inequalities as well as social norms and some of these these big barriers um and they need um they need we need to think beyond coverage and we need to think you know and we need to think beyond you know a certain single stakeholder as you know and you know how we can address these these barriers as as has been said repeatedly in this panel you know now it’s only exacerbating inequalities and it’s absolutely critical that we we move this needle.

Alison Gillwald: Thank you so much and um as before we carry on I’m just going to ask the audience um particularly to um sort of prime themselves we’ve been talking about and we’ll continue to talk about a lot of um access solutions regulatory strategies to reduce prices issues of affordability but I think you know a lot of this demand side evidence is demonstrating that we can no longer solve this problem with uh siloed sort of sectoral solutions there’s you know we can we can remove taxes from mobile phones we can do a number of things but actually we really need transversal digital policies that will focus on our education challenges these fundamental challenges that we are facing um human development challenges and that you know the um gender questions as have been historically posed which homogenize you know women um really aren’t helping us with policy interventions that really need to be focused at you know women at the intersection of those multiple other inequalities so if you look overall at issues of um sort of rural deficits in terms of access to the internet and you compare it with gender rural is worse off now obviously there’s also a lot of women concentrated in those rural areas But in fact, if you look at some of our data, it’s an issue of the poor and it’s also issues of kind of location and those kinds of things. So if they were actually, you know, they’re poor men who are worse off than urban poor women just because of their proximity. So we really need sort of far more nuanced interventions, but we also need interventions that are way beyond certainly the telecommunication sector, communication sector, the historical sectors that look at this problem. If we can go to Carlos, Carlos, some of the problem setting has been stated, so please do just add to that. But if you’d also just move to what you see as some of the possible solutions that we could deal here on the access side, and then we’re hoping for some really innovative responses on some of the non-access ways in which we can address this problem as well.

Carlos Rey-Moreno: Thank you so much, Alison, and I want to go back to one of the points that you mentioned in the introduction around costing, how much money is needed to close the digital divide from an infrastructure point of view. And I believe there are way too many conversations about costing, how much does it cost to close the digital divide, and I believe we are going to hear a new figure at some point this year, and not that much about how that investment could be used differently, how to enable other models. Also coming from the G20 in Brazil, the Digital Investment Infrastructure Initiative from the ITU and several second-tier development banks stated that stakeholders should think beyond typical for-profit models to cover 70% of the remaining access gaps. So addressing the same actors, considering the same ways of building infrastructure is leading to some part of this inequality that we see, due to the return on investment that they are seeking, due to other practices. as we’ve heard. But it is surprising to also see that the Global Digital Compact is referring to investing in local networks to close the digital divide, right? Because why it happens that some of these local networks are socially driven models that go way beyond the transactional way that we’ve understood the internet so far. Enterprises are transacting for a price, a service that is internet connectivity, period, right? There are these other models based on socially driven intentions, I would say, or bottom lines, social bottom lines or environmental bottom lines, social enterprises that go beyond those transactional models, sorry, those transactional services. They provide social inclusion services, they provide transformational services that at the end of the day create a circular economy, maintain the money locally to develop other small enterprises that develop the local skills required not only to run that particular local network but to run other businesses in the community that contribute to creating culturally relevant content and services using sensor networks, for instance, and that contribute quite significantly to local innovation. We were talking about innovation before. The amount of innovation that can come from the communities and from the rural areas is astonishing, addressing their own community needs and their own problems. Yet education systems are more proposing that those rural people go and contribute to the economies as we see them in urban areas and not to the problems that they are facing locally. So thinking through how that supply and demand meet with this type of interventions that stimulate circular economies locally, I think it’s also a way of thinking about the equitable digital inclusion. that you alluded to also. Thank you.

Alison Gillwald: Thank you so much. We’ll come back to that. Before we go into speaking a little further on some of the solutions, are there any questions from the room as we also try and gather some questions online? I know we’ve got a number of people online. Are there any questions or comments from the room at this point? Okay, Leslie, what do we have online? If we can turn to Peter for that, but also to hear from Dr Gillian Marcelle as well. Yep, yep. Okay, so while we gather some of those online questions, we are also going to ask Dr Gillian Marcelle to come in. Dr Gillian Marcelle, if you could also add to your extensive experience on what some of the problems are, but also move on to what you see as some of the solutions, which I know you’ve put a lot of thought into. Certainly, and thank you so much, Alison, for the invitation to join this panel with so many pioneers.

Dr Gillian Marcelle: Actually, I want to go in a different direction, if I may, because I think it’s important to actually put a theoretical framing on this question of how do we actually achieve equitable digital inclusion, because all of those premises and all of those words actually matter. And in listening to my colleagues, and I was listening very carefully, what I didn’t hear come up is the root causes that lead to exclusion and that lead to inequity. And the root causes, in my view, are the fact that we have an extractive economic system. on which we are then trying to layer demand and supply side solutions. So, to my mind, equitable digital inclusion will be achieved when laws, regulation, policy, ecosystem strengthening, entrepreneurship, finance and investment take place. But if they do within the status quo, then nothing will change. And we will still have what we’ve called the unconnected last mile problems. And we will still be talking about the things that we’ve been talking about for 25 years. And my own work in this area has been, as Alison mentioned, from the policy and regulatory lens, but I was also deeply involved in financing, and not financing at a small scale, but financing from the pioneers of the African telecoms revolution. And I will say that there was innovation at a narrative level in that time, which is now nearly 25 years ago, because when we were making models to look at whether or not investing in Nigeria was a good thing for MTN to do, there was no data. And so when I hear my colleagues talk about the fact that you can’t get reliable information about the cost of a handset, or what you would price data at, that leaves out a fundamental issue, which is risk. We want to encourage the private sector to take risks and to benefit from a return. And so whatever we do from the policy and regulatory domain should not exclude or leave out the fact that some private sector solutions and providers will succeed and others will fail. And there should not be an attempt to stop that from happening under the presumption that that is the way to connect the unconnected. One final point. If a mobile handset like the one I have here is an asset for production and for well-being, there are in existence alternative collateral models for financing things that people need. And so in looking at the things that we need to be doing, not only from a policy and regulatory side in the telecoms or in the tech sector, we also need to be looking at what are the enabling conditions that would allow for a variety of solutions that tackle all of the very good things that I’ve heard from my colleagues, but do not assume that the direction of change is going to be coming from policy and regulatory only. Because that then leaves out a very important engine of change which has been shown to work and I’ll leave it there for now and say a little bit more about what I think needs to be done so that we don’t end up with a digital society that is anywhere like the United States where you’ve had Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley values and norms produce a digital society that is about as toxic as we could possibly imagine. I’ll leave it there for now.

Alison Gillwald: Thank you so much for that Dr Gillian Marcelle. I’m hoping that we’ll get some responses to that. I did want to draw your attention those of you who had a chance to look at the issues paper to indicate that this is not only a policy and regulatory alternatives. We’re looking at alternative business strategies, we’re looking at cooperatives, social enterprises which we’ll come back to. I think we are though looking at some of the public interest policy and regulatory failures that we’ve seen and I think we are looking at new shifts that are acknowledging that despite the enabling conditions that have been created for the extraordinary investments that we’ve seen by mobile networks on the African continent but also now of course fiber networks across the continent. The creation of these conditions prioritized the supply side valuation of resources and really neglected the demand side valuation of resources that would recognize these critical resources as digital public goods and increasingly global digital public goods that require demand side interventions if they are to serve as critical inputs in the economy and to be universally accessible as we require digital public goods to be and so one of the mechanisms that we think is a real travesty in the long theoretical and economic regulatory competition levers that they’re meant to be is you know the market reviews that have barely been conducted on the African continent and the demonstrate the need to assess dominance in markets and effectively remedy that and I think many you know there’s an extraordinary evidence of the impacts of wholesale access regulation in opening up markets that has been got to the point where it’s meant to be implemented and would have changed the environment very very differently to what it is now and through the ethos of creating the certainty for investors and getting the certainty for investors I would argue Dr Gillian Marcelle there’s been you know an open conversation to that they that commercial supply-side assessment spectrum with anything you know that that’s gone without creating the public value the commons aspects of this that would have allowed greater inclusion and I know Steve your work has also focused on this and now not only kind of wholesale you know leased facilities and those kinds of things but of course very importantly with mobile operators in many parts of the continent actually being the dominant operators no longer the old fixed networks your access to API’s that would have just changed this environment entirely and I just wondered if you want to pick up on that.

Steve Song: Yeah I think a wholesale access is increasingly a massive barrier to the development of affordable access typically in many countries it it costs more to transit inside the country via fiber than it does to connect internationally. And there has to be mechanisms for bringing down the cost of backhaul, which is increasingly the highest burden of cost, especially for small operators in terms of operating costs. Things like structural separation, breaking out the backbone from the incumbents and setting it up as a separate company is a great step forward. But I think there are even better things to do. One of my favourite examples is Corus in New Zealand, who is formerly part of the incumbent and was separated out into a backbone network across New Zealand and who have implemented effectively flat pricing across the country. So anywhere you can connect to a Corus network, you can peer at the same price as if you are in the capital city or very close to it. And that’s a huge issue. We see national research and education networks like Tenet, Sanren in South Africa implementing the same thing so that universities connect to their national backbone network at the same price, no matter where they are, whether they’re rural or urban. If you were to implement those strategies across, say, state-owned backbones, you would unlock competition. You would incentivise small operators to deliver services in rural areas where they simply can’t at the moment because of the cost of backhaul.

Alison Gillwald: Thanks very much for that, Steve. Claire, I was wondering if you wanted to come in on the mobile and the regulatory and possibly what alternatives GSMA is looking at addressing these so-called uneconomic areas. If you do have non-technical or sectoral strategies, if you’re actually supporting educational other initiatives, please I highlight those as well.

Claire Sibthorpe: Yeah, as I said in in sort of the opening comment, I think that the biggest issue in terms of connectivity is, is, you know, not the coverage. I mean, obviously, coverage is important, but it’s not only a coverage issue. And on the coverage point, I think, you know, where those areas where it’s not economical for operators to cover, you know, looking at in how they can be covered. And the different models is really important. But I do think that we need to also really look at these, you know, coverages, the data shows coverage is not going to get people connected and using the internet coverage alone. Obviously, coverage is an important prerequisite, but alone, it’s not as I said, 90% of the people are who are not using it are covered. So what we do need to do is address things like affordability of devices. And I think there’s a range of strategies that can be done there. You know, taxation is a big issue, reducing taxation, looking at innovative device financing schemes, looking at subsidy schemes, because, you know, the cost of these devices is not on its own going to get down to the level that the people who are not connected can can afford. So we need to think about that. But literacy and digital skills are also critical. And again, I think that requires, you know, multi stakeholder multi agency intervention. So we need to be building in digital skills, you know, in with across education and training programs of the government across, you know, and, and, you know, and ensuring that those things that those initiative help highlight, you know, how the internet is relevant for different segments. I think a lot of the time we see in our research, people say this is not for me, because they see role in, you know, maybe in the marketing or awareness campaigns role. I mean, urban men and not not necessarily reflecting themselves and their life needs, but also ensuring that those training campaigns build in elements around how to keep yourself safe and secure online and address all those those issues. And I think in terms of the mobile operators, I think first of all I think it can’t be done by one stakeholder, but mobile operators are doing this, so they’re doing a range of device financing, looking at data that they get from their networks as alternative credit scorings to provide device financing, providing a lot of digital skills training. We have, GSME has created a mobile internet skills training toolkit which is a free open source creative commons training content that can be used to provide people the basic skills to get on to use the internet and use it safely. It’s now been used across 40 countries, been trained, I think 75 million people now at least have been trained, so I think we’re trying, because I think we found a lot of the digital skills campaigns are also focused on laptops and tablets, but those are not the devices people are using their hands, and so they weren’t able to translate that training into ways that they could use in their lives, so we’ve tried to address that, some of that gap, but I think it requires interventions by quite a range of people, and I think we need to be focusing on these sort of, as you say, the demand side barriers, and we need to be thinking across stakeholder groups as to how we do that to make sure that we’re really able for people to get online and get online safely and meet and use the internet to meet their life needs.

Alison Gillwald: So thanks very much Claire. Carlos, could you talk to us a little bit about, we’ve spoken about some of the sort of failures, regulatory failures and those sorts of things, but and in regard to some of the more kind of systemic issues around, you know, that would change things at scale around getting greater competition and through wholesale access and driving down prices, but they’ve also been, I mean when Steve was speaking in the beginning about a few big stones or just like, you know, lots of stones, I think as Steve’s often said, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom kind of models, the ability of niche innovations community services, now social enterprises services to break into the system as you know had relatively high regulatory transaction costs and you know what do you see as the key levers there if one accepts that these are actually the way that one can you know address some of the systemic challenges that we’re facing.

Carlos Rey-Moreno: Thank you, thank you so much Alison. Well I think one of it or the most important one is recognition. Recognition and a deep insight into the value of a diverse diversified ecosystem of actors. We see that still there are you know like this mindset of only traditional large operators countrywide operators can solve certain problems and again those are doing great but only contributing or providing services from that transactional perspective that I was alluding to and not entering in the transformational aspect that the internet could bring into this into this aspect. So that would be the one recognition that other actors are needed and that other actors are contributing because when those actors are provided with an enabling regulatory environment well here in Europe for instance where there is a vast array of small operators providing fiber optics wireless you name it even private mobile network mobile networks in certain areas you just need to declare your activity your provision of telecommunication services. In the Philippines you need a congressional franchise the Congress needs to allow you to deploy infrastructure so reducing the regulatory barriers of what do you need to actually start some sort of a business practice whether social or not certainly is gonna allow to for those smallest stones that Steve was alluding to to actually grow and thrill right. I think also touching a bit on what Dr Gillian Marcelle was saying about that we need to establish innovative financing and investment models that allow this small and localised operators to thrill. I have the feeling that in the financial sector, a lot of the interest has been on supporting the interest of capital and not supporting the interest of people. I think 20 years after Wysys, we need to start recognising the financial models to think through or to understand how we can support smaller operators, smaller ticket sizes, understanding what are the needs of those smaller actors, which of course are critical and there are starting to be some very interesting models around this. And lastly, capacity building. We are super proud to have launched last week the first course with the ITU in Africa for technical promoters at the community level after five editions in Latin America. And I think once you have that regulatory frame, once you have the recognition, once you have the regulatory framework, once you have the innovative financing and investment models in place, if enough skills and enough awareness is around for people to take benefit and advantage of this financing and these regulatory interventions, we see this thrilling. In Kenya, there are 20 community networks already and more will come. In Colombia, there are across the same number. In Brazil, there has been a magnificent collaboration with the regulator. There are more than 50, right? So when those things start to appear, more of those diversified actors and local innovation is going to take place to create those other impacts that I was alluding to in relation to circular economies, local innovation and culturally relevant content and services.

Alison Gillwald: Carlos, I suppose some of the scepticism is kind of scaling us. You know, that yes, great to see that capacity building, but how many people have been trained? How many people can be trained? So, you know, what kind of more systematic… opportunities there are. But I think some of the kind of collective response. So if one, you know, enables all of these smaller providers, if one enables different kinds of capacity building, if one gets curriculum, actually, you know, it’s probably more entrenched in curriculums and stuff. Collectively, we could we could see some outcomes. But I think one of the main challenges, one of the things has been around like demand stimulation, that actually for the people now who are not online, big challenges around awareness of the Internet. These are obviously least educated people. And of course, very little local language content for people. So there seems to be a particular role for these social enterprise organizations, community organizations that have are able to also produce content that could stimulate the Internet take up.

Carlos Rey-Moreno: So someone that was said at a session yesterday was in relation to to fair trade. Right. Was in relation to creating the same environment as has been created for social and solidarity economy in other sectors, agriculture, retail, you name it, to to to really reach the scale that there would be enough products and trainings and whatnot. As you were saying, whole of government approach. If this was a course that every pivot in every country would teach how someone could start a small business in that area around telecommunications as they do with agriculture or with retail or with car mechanics or whatever. Certainly you can you can start creating this type of a scale that you were that you were referring to. And the same with with mechanisms, with financing mechanisms. We were talking this morning at a discussion with someone that in Kenya, you need at least 20 percent of interest to pay in 20 percent of interest rates to get a loan for for for for a small operator, because there is not that understanding. There is not that awareness in the financial sector locally that these small operators can actually do any of this. right so that type of financial sector deepening that type of engaging with local financial institutions so they can make available products that are accessible for small operators and small social enterprises in the country would be very much necessary I think for for that side of scale going again to the thousand flowers blooming that Steve was talking about but we need to look at it ecosystemically if it’s three or four philanthropic organizations giving grants here and we’re not going to tackle any problem whatsoever.

Alison Gillwald: And of course you say a whole of government but, I think some of the problems have been is there’s been a lot of investment focus in government and across government but actually what we need is a whole of society kind of approach that hopefully government will play a more active role in creating that public value kind of environment that we want for this I’m hoping we can go on to some questions before we go back to Dr Gillian Marcelle actually Dr Gillian Marcelle’s got her hand up so let’s take Dr Gillian Marcelle’s question Dr Gillian Marcelle’s response while we look Leslie I’m hoping that you can see Peter or can Peter hear me directly okay so if we can just line up some questions Peter and then we’ve got a question fortunately at our very small round table please do come and join us Dr Gillian Marcelle do you want to go ahead and then we’ll take one from the floor and then we’ll go online

Dr Gillian Marcelle: certainly what I wanted to come back to is the issue of dominance and your point about that the and I am assuming that you’re talking about regulatory agencies in developing countries have not taken the opportunity to look at dominance and industry concentration and so on in the tech sector and of course we know exactly why that is the case because so much of what happens and what called the digital space, gets its way of being from what is happening in the United States. And 25 years ago, a decision was made that deregulation and not even applying, Alison, this will be in your wheelhouse, not even applying broadcast regulations to all of these platform companies. So that the zeitgeist saw regulation and public interest, the notion that tech should serve the public interest, shifted. And it shifted 25 years ago. And so we must acknowledge that. Because the reason that we are struggling with Connectivity Plus and so on is because people are being treated like consumers in a neoliberal framing rather than citizens who have the right to communication and the rights to access. 25 years ago, we would be having a different conversation. 25 years ago, we also had pushed the multilateral organizations into recognizing the concepts that you are speaking about, you know, the global commons, telecoms and so on as global public goods. And we need to get back to that. Because if we don’t, and recognize just how far that shift has happened, unlike when Nelson Mandela was saying in 1996, that there are more fixed lines in all of Manhattan, than they are in all of sub-Saharan Africa. Now, what we can say is there are people in the Bronx in New York who cannot get access to internet. So it is the underlying economic system, not even finance. The economic system says you treat people like consumers in a market for profit maximization and then you layer everything on top of that. So that’s what I wanted to come back to because all of the things that we are talking about, market concentration, regulatory capture, the limits of regulatory power, the sort of the meekness of those interventions also come from that shaping of the frame. And there are things that we can do. We should not accept that it’s a foregone conclusion but we must also see from where this has originated as well.

Alison Gillwald: Thank you so much Dr Gillian Marcelle and we have a question from our roundtable. If you’d introduce yourself and then we’ll see somebody standing up there as well. Please if you want to join us, do. Please go ahead.

Audience: Hi, can you hear me? Yes, so I’m Leandro Navarro. I’m coming from an initiative called eReuse and also from APC and I wanted to highlight, because it’s being discussed, when it comes to talking about inclusion, it makes sense to count in let’s say millions or billions, not unconnected, but when it comes to meaningful connectivity probably you don’t find it on the amount of packets, IP packets that you get, but on what you do. What you do, the labels, the value and so forth. But also as it was commented, I mean I haven’t seen anyone connected directly to the internet if they connect to a device. And so, typically, we’ve been looking in community networks or in network infrastructure to the last mile. But I think it’s important to look at the last meter, because the last meter is when the action happens, when the meaningful part occurs. So imagine that we are talking about water. It’s very important to have water. But it depends if I have a glass or if I have a toilet or if I have a swimming pool. It’s completely different. And that is the meaning there. I’m swimming. I’m doing exercise or I’m eating because I have a pot and I’m cooking my food. So you cannot see it on the network layer. So I think it’s important to look at the last meter. And in the last meter, well, there are devices. It’s not the same. I mean, we have been doing projects in which we go to schools in Uganda and we replace mobile phones by laptops because mobile phone is not useful for learning. But a laptop can be. So it makes a big difference. So once we go beyond the challenge of bringing the Internet there, then the next thing is which device is there. And, you know, it’s interesting to see that there are unconnected people, but also there are unused devices. And then regarding affordability, there is this interesting opportunity that there are devices which are no longer used by one owner, but still they have a lot of years of life span. And then, I mean, refurbish them, refurbish them and collecting them and giving them to people that need a device that shouldn’t be the last model in the market can also help. Connecting the unconnected by supplying them unused devices and helping the environment. So, I mean, there are a lot of potential in the last meter and also in creating affordable devices which do not need to be manufactured again. So, well, I think it’s, yeah, it’s been discussed. I think the user device makes a lot of sense, a lot of meaning to the user. Of course, the user has to know what to do with it, but the device is not the same glass than some input.

Alison Gillwald: Thank you so much for that input. I think the importance of connectivity and the device, these are absolutely necessary conditions. So nobody’s saying that these access issues aren’t absolutely critical. I think the device refurbishment is a nice example. I think we have it in the issues paper, but I think it could be. Brazil, for example, has really very interesting examples of recycling within their circular economy policy and practice that are kind of scalable. Because I think in many of our environments, they’ve been little small project here for retraining people or something like that. So kind of getting those, you know, there’s innovation out of constraint that Africa is famous for. Models more effectively working to get the kind of systemic and scaling. I am hoping that the questions, some questions that we got lined up from the thing in here are also going to deal with some of the non-access issues. But please go ahead anyway.

Audience: Hi, so my name is Kevin Hernandez and I work at the Universal Postal Union, which is the UN organization that deals with the postal sector. And my question is specifically about the non-access issues. So I think, and I want to thank all of you for all the solutions that you put forward on this panel. They’ve all been very interesting. And specifically, I want to thank, I don’t know your name, but the person who mentioned something about community-based organizations. Because I think they also play a very critical role in the last mile, not just in connecting people, but also dealing with the immediate risks of digital exclusion. And what do I mean by that? I mean, in the case when someone is not connected and all the services in their country are digitalized and you can no longer access things in person, where do people usually turn to? They usually turn to a library. and they turned to a post office that might be offering the government services and digital financial services or they might turn to an NGO or they might turn into some other community based organization. But I don’t really hear many solutions that are put forward that kind of focus on connecting these intermediaries because these intermediaries play a big role in ensuring that the immediate effects of exclusion are not are not felt today. So we’re not going to we’re not going to connect all the unconnected anytime soon. There are billions of them. So what do we do now to ensure that these kind of intermediaries are not left in a place where they’re left to fend for themselves without any support? We need to also support these intermediaries. And how do we do that? And also, I just want to flag that I work for the UPU and I work for a project that aims to connect every post office to the Internet and leverage them for digital inclusion. So anybody who would like to learn more, you can come and find me. I have some concept notes about our project. Thank you.

Alison Gillwald: Thank you so much for that very useful input. And to say that, of course, a lot of the work that has been done by APC in this area and Mozilla with Steve. But anyway, I think just to emphasize that if the importance of intermediaries hasn’t been highlighted enough, it absolutely should be. And I think when we were talking about some of the high transaction costs for community services and those kinds of things is precisely to enable that kind of intermediary intervention. I think another interesting policy aspect to that, though, the challenge has been not to allow the state to abdicate its responsibilities to, you know, we’ll just let those communities sort out this little kind of minimalist network there or something, but to actively support them as part of programs. And it’s a state’s responsibility to do that and or to ensure that the licensed operator or whatever actually does serve those communities. So I think it’s an important policy debate. And I’m still hoping for some grand strategy. that’s going to solve the underlying human development challenge, so let’s go online and see what we have there. Peter can you hear me? I keep looking at Leslie thinking that he’s got the connection to you, but can you hear me?

Audience: Thank you, yes I can. There was a useful comment from Ramune about another form of intermediary. I quote, local libraries when equipped with sufficient connectivity and computers for public use contribute effectively to digital inclusion of communities they serve. Besides physical access tackling, also digital literacy, online safety and privacy issues, as well as walking people of all ages to digital learning opportunities. So putting that as a question, would you and the panel agree with that, and are there any other of those forms of intermediary like the post office that we just heard about?

Alison Gillwald: Great, so we’ve actually got a minute for each of the panellists, so I’m going to let them respond to each other, which I think some have already done, and then also just to take that last question if you’d like to. Steve, would you like to go ahead?

Steve Song: Thanks Alison. I think there’s a thread here that strikes me as very important. That relates to intermediaries such as post offices and libraries, but also to community networks, and that is the fact that we focus a lot on the capacity building of the consumer, right, to be able to use the network, but we don’t talk as much about the ability to build the network and capacity building to build and own networks. I came across a lovely quote from Richard Feynman, one of the great physicists of the 20th century. He said, what I cannot create, I cannot understand, and I think this is true of the internet, and it gives me pause when I think about solutions like Starlink, which are… The very remarkableness is kind of also their flaw in the sense that when you connect a Starlink dish you just turn it on and it connects to the internet and that’s it. Which is remarkable, but it also means that you don’t know what an IP address is, you don’t know what an autonomous system number is, you don’t know how to build the network and it is a loss of agency and control as a result. So I think that national research and education networks that are building their own fiber backbones, the same potential exists for post offices and libraries not to just receive connectivity but to be involved in the solution, in the provision of connectivity and I think there’s a huge risk when organizations are not involved, when citizens are not involved in that, you get situations such as we see now with AFRINIC, the agency responsible for assigning IP addresses across African countries, is in crisis because in order to participate in AFRINIC you need to be an internet service provider, you need to have an autonomous system number, you need to be an agent of building networks and if we don’t actually focus and invest in that ability to invest, then we’re further becoming, as Julian says, consumers rather than

Alison Gillwald: citizens in this process. Thanks Steve. Carlos, one minute please. No, less than that.

Carlos Rey-Moreno: Well, we live in a diverse world with diverse societies and in many ways the internet has been homogenized in the way that it’s been provided and I think at the center of this solution for equitable digital inclusion we need to embrace the diversity of solutions because Again, as Leandra was saying, like many people will use the internet differently, and talking to what Steve was saying in relation to autonomy, we need to enable the capacity of diverse ways of engaging, building, using, etc. And neither from the investors, nor from the regulators or the ministries, that ecosystem is there to enable and support that diversity, right? The risk is there, people are willing to take the risk, people are willing to do these interventions, but they don’t have an enabling ecosystem.

Alison Gillwald: Thanks very much. Sophie, please, you’ve got like 25 seconds.

Sophie Maddens: All right. Carlos, you gave me a perfect segue, because I’ve heard, I think all of us agree, we need a different mindset, right? So we need a different mindset to close the gap, that difficult gap. But that different mindset needs a different set of tools, skills and processes. So I think it’s not just about policy and regulation, but really that approach and experimenting, right? We need the variety of solutions and being bold enough to be able to experiment. You think of the regulatory sandboxes. So I think agility is key, boldness is key, having the necessary regulatory skills is key. And I think I’ve also heard that cross-sectoral collaboration, right? We need to think, if you think of digital financial inclusion, that’s automatically the working between the sectors. I think all of that is key.

Alison Gillwald: Thank you so much, Sophie, because that was quite a nice summing up for us that we’re not going to have time to do of highlighting some of those issues. We’ve got offline. Claire, if you want to just give us a 10 second response, please do.

Sophie Maddens: Sure. I mean, I guess I think what we’re all alluding to is there’s no one sort of silver bullet, that everything we do needs to be grounded in the realities of the people we’re trying to connect and connect in a meaningful way. And so I think we need and I think also what is critical is not only understanding people’s needs and barriers, but also taking a kind of holistic approach. It’s not about just giving coverage or giving devices. we need to think about skills, relevant content, that ecosystem that Carlos was talking about, enabling that kind of, you know, so we need to be thinking holistically about the barriers and it needs to be grounded in really the needs and barriers of the different communities and it is different, people communities are different and their needs and barriers are different and and thinking about that in that way.

Alison Gillwald: Okay, I think we don’t have a chance, Dr Gillian Marcelle, unless you have a off, we’re off time, but if you want to have a five second, 10 second response, please go ahead. I think you should trust your own instincts,

Dr Gillian Marcelle: Alison, because I think you know exactly how we should re-centre sustainable development into this agenda for what is being called digital inclusion. So thanks again for your leadership.

Alison Gillwald: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dr Gillian Marcelle, and for all the pioneering work over so many years. My only thing, again, I can’t help myself, yes, Steve, Starlink does come down and you just switch on the internet, but it also doesn’t come free, even though a lot of the discourse is that this is this incredible free service that’s going to provide all, solve all our universality problems. And the other thing I just want to leave us with, with lots of these really important access solutions, but that are not, you know, that are kind of community or collective access solutions, is that should we face another pandemic, which we inevitably will, but if we should face it this month, this year, we are not going to be any better off than we were, where the last pandemic put the majority of Africans at risk who were unable to digitally substitute both for the health risk and of course the economic risks associated with lockdowns. They could not get to community centres, they could not get to libraries and they could not get to schools and they saw the greatest negative outcomes, death, from being unable to mitigate that risk. digitally. So onwards and forwards with these solutions and I’m still looking forward for some of those non-access solutions that we can take forward into the final G20 equitable digital inclusion responding to evidence of demand side constraints. Thank you so much. Thanks to our fabulous panellists and to the audience. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Agreement points

Coverage is not the primary barrier to digital inclusion

Speakers

– Alison Gillwald
– Claire Sibthorpe
– Steve Song

Arguments

Many African countries have 95-99% coverage but less than 20% connectivity, indicating supply-side solutions aren’t addressing the core problem

90% of unconnected people live in areas with mobile broadband coverage but face other barriers to usage

Growth of internet access is plateauing as we’ve connected the easy parts, leaving 2.9 billion requiring different approaches

Summary

All speakers agree that infrastructure coverage exists in most areas but people cannot access or meaningfully use internet services due to other barriers, indicating that supply-side solutions alone are insufficient

Topics

Development | Infrastructure

Device affordability is a major barrier to digital inclusion

Speakers

– Alison Gillwald
– Claire Sibthorpe

Arguments

The main barrier to accessing the internet is the cost of the device

The biggest barrier to internet access is the cost of devices, not data prices

For the poorest 20% in sub-Saharan Africa, an entry-level internet device costs 99% of average monthly income

Summary

Both speakers identify device costs as the primary financial barrier preventing people from getting online, with specific evidence showing devices are unaffordable for the poorest populations

Topics

Development | Economic

Multi-stakeholder collaboration is essential for digital inclusion

Speakers

– Sophie Maddens
– Claire Sibthorpe
– Carlos Rey-Moreno

Arguments

Cross-sectoral collaboration is essential, such as between telecommunications and financial sectors for digital financial inclusion

Addressing digital inclusion requires multi-stakeholder collaboration across sectors, not single-stakeholder solutions

Recognition of diverse actors beyond traditional large operators is needed, along with reduced regulatory barriers for small operators

Summary

All three speakers emphasize that digital inclusion cannot be solved by any single stakeholder or sector, requiring coordinated approaches across multiple actors and sectors

Topics

Development | Legal and regulatory

Digital skills and education are critical barriers beyond connectivity

Speakers

– Sophie Maddens
– Claire Sibthorpe
– Alison Gillwald

Arguments

Universal meaningful connectivity requires quality, availability, affordability, devices, skills and security – not just minimal broadband connection

Literacy and digital skills are the second biggest barrier to getting online after device affordability

Main determinants of internet access and meaningful use correlate with education level, which correlates with income and employment

Summary

Speakers agree that having access to technology is insufficient without the skills and education needed to use it meaningfully, with education being a fundamental determinant of digital inclusion

Topics

Development | Sociocultural

Need for ecosystem diversity and alternative models

Speakers

– Steve Song
– Carlos Rey-Moreno

Arguments

Telecommunications ecosystems need diversity like healthy forests – protecting small operators and encouraging different business models

Social enterprises and community networks provide transformational services beyond transactional connectivity, creating circular economies and local innovation

Recognition of diverse actors beyond traditional large operators is needed, along with reduced regulatory barriers for small operators

Summary

Both speakers advocate for diverse telecommunications ecosystems that include small operators, community networks, and alternative business models rather than relying solely on large traditional operators

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Development

Similar viewpoints

Both speakers critique regulatory failures and the shift away from public interest regulation, arguing that current approaches prioritize commercial interests over citizen rights and public value

Speakers

– Alison Gillwald
– Dr Gillian Marcelle

Arguments

Market reviews and dominance assessments have barely been conducted on the African continent, missing opportunities for wholesale access regulation

The shift toward deregulation 25 years ago treated people as consumers rather than citizens with communication rights

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Human rights

Both emphasize the importance of local agency, control, and capacity building that empowers communities to create and manage their own solutions rather than being passive consumers

Speakers

– Steve Song
– Carlos Rey-Moreno

Arguments

Capacity building should include not just using networks but building and owning them to maintain agency and control

Educational systems should focus on local innovation and community problem-solving rather than just preparing rural people for urban economies

Topics

Development | Sociocultural

Both advocate for flexible, experimental approaches that can be tailored to specific community needs rather than applying universal solutions

Speakers

– Sophie Maddens
– Claire Sibthorpe

Arguments

Regulatory sandboxes and experimentation are needed along with agility and boldness in trying different approaches

Solutions need to be grounded in the realities and specific needs of different communities rather than one-size-fits-all approaches

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Development

Unexpected consensus

Limitations of current successful mobile network models

Speakers

– Steve Song
– Claire Sibthorpe
– Alison Gillwald

Arguments

Current regulatory focus on competition needs to expand to include strategies for inclusion

90% of unconnected people live in areas with mobile broadband coverage but face other barriers to usage

Many African countries have 95-99% coverage but less than 20% connectivity, indicating supply-side solutions aren’t addressing the core problem

Explanation

Despite mobile networks being extraordinarily successful in expanding coverage across Africa, all speakers acknowledge their limitations in reaching universal inclusion, which is unexpected given the typical celebration of mobile success stories

Topics

Development | Infrastructure

Need for systemic rather than sectoral solutions

Speakers

– Dr Gillian Marcelle
– Alison Gillwald
– Carlos Rey-Moreno

Arguments

The underlying extractive economic system needs to be addressed rather than just layering demand and supply solutions on the status quo

Main determinants of internet access and meaningful use correlate with education level, which correlates with income and employment

Social enterprises and community networks provide transformational services beyond transactional connectivity, creating circular economies and local innovation

Explanation

There is unexpected consensus that digital inclusion requires addressing fundamental economic and social structures rather than just technological or sectoral interventions, suggesting a more radical approach than typically discussed in telecommunications policy

Topics

Economic | Development

Overall assessment

Summary

Strong consensus exists on core challenges (coverage vs. meaningful access, device affordability, need for skills) and the inadequacy of current approaches. Speakers agree on the need for multi-stakeholder collaboration, ecosystem diversity, and moving beyond traditional telecommunications solutions.

Consensus level

High level of consensus with significant implications for policy direction. The agreement suggests a paradigm shift is needed from supply-side infrastructure focus to demand-side, holistic approaches that address education, affordability, and systemic inequalities. This consensus among diverse stakeholders (ITU, GSMA, civil society, academia) indicates potential for coordinated policy action, though implementation challenges remain significant given the systemic nature of required changes.

Different viewpoints

Primary focus for addressing digital inclusion – infrastructure vs systemic economic change

Speakers

– Dr Gillian Marcelle
– Sophie Maddens
– Claire Sibthorpe
– Steve Song

Arguments

The underlying extractive economic system needs to be addressed rather than just layering demand and supply solutions on the status quo

Universal meaningful connectivity requires quality, availability, affordability, devices, skills, and security – not just minimal broadband connection

90% of unconnected people live in areas with mobile broadband coverage but face other barriers to usage

Growth of internet access is plateauing as we’ve connected the easy parts, leaving 2.9 billion requiring different approaches

Summary

Dr Marcelle argues for fundamental economic system change as the root solution, while other speakers focus on technical, regulatory, and capacity-building approaches within existing frameworks

Topics

Economic | Development | Legal and regulatory

Role of private sector and market mechanisms in digital inclusion

Speakers

– Dr Gillian Marcelle
– Carlos Rey-Moreno

Arguments

Risk-taking and innovation should be encouraged in the private sector while ensuring variety of solutions for inclusion

Alternative financing models are needed that support smaller operators and social enterprises rather than just capital interests

Summary

Dr Marcelle supports private sector risk-taking and natural market processes including failures, while Rey-Moreno criticizes financial sector focus on capital interests over people’s interests

Topics

Economic | Development

Scale and measurement of digital exclusion

Speakers

– Sophie Maddens
– Alison Gillwald

Arguments

2.6 billion people remain unconnected to the internet, with deep divides persisting across rural/urban, income, gender, and age groups

The real number of people not digitally included is closer to 4-4.5 billion when using meaningful connectivity definitions

Summary

Significant disagreement on the actual scale of digital exclusion, with Gillwald arguing the problem is much larger when meaningful connectivity standards are applied

Topics

Development | Human rights

Unexpected differences

Historical framing and root cause analysis

Speakers

– Dr Gillian Marcelle
– Other panelists

Arguments

The shift toward deregulation 25 years ago treated people as consumers rather than citizens with communication rights

Various technical and policy solutions focused on current barriers

Explanation

Dr Marcelle’s historical analysis of deregulation 25 years ago as the root cause was unexpected given other speakers’ focus on current technical and policy solutions. This fundamental disagreement about whether to address historical policy shifts or current barriers represents a deeper philosophical divide about reform vs revolution approaches

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Human rights

Data reliability and measurement challenges

Speakers

– Sophie Maddens
– Alison Gillwald

Arguments

2.6 billion people remain unconnected to the internet, with deep divides persisting across rural/urban, income, gender, and age groups

The real number of people not digitally included is closer to 4-4.5 billion when using meaningful connectivity definitions

Explanation

The significant disagreement on basic statistics about digital exclusion was unexpected among experts working on the same issues. This suggests fundamental measurement and definitional challenges that could undermine policy coordination

Topics

Development | Legal and regulatory

Overall assessment

Summary

The discussion revealed moderate to significant disagreements on fundamental approaches (systemic change vs technical solutions), measurement of the problem scale, and the role of market mechanisms, while showing convergence on the need for diverse solutions and multi-stakeholder approaches

Disagreement level

The disagreements are substantial enough to potentially impact policy coordination and resource allocation, particularly the 2.6 billion vs 4-4.5 billion measurement gap and the fundamental divide between reform-oriented technical solutions versus systemic economic transformation approaches. However, the shared recognition of demand-side barriers and need for innovation provides common ground for collaborative action.

Partial agreements

Similar viewpoints

Both speakers critique regulatory failures and the shift away from public interest regulation, arguing that current approaches prioritize commercial interests over citizen rights and public value

Speakers

– Alison Gillwald
– Dr Gillian Marcelle

Arguments

Market reviews and dominance assessments have barely been conducted on the African continent, missing opportunities for wholesale access regulation

The shift toward deregulation 25 years ago treated people as consumers rather than citizens with communication rights

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Human rights

Both emphasize the importance of local agency, control, and capacity building that empowers communities to create and manage their own solutions rather than being passive consumers

Speakers

– Steve Song
– Carlos Rey-Moreno

Arguments

Capacity building should include not just using networks but building and owning them to maintain agency and control

Educational systems should focus on local innovation and community problem-solving rather than just preparing rural people for urban economies

Topics

Development | Sociocultural

Both advocate for flexible, experimental approaches that can be tailored to specific community needs rather than applying universal solutions

Speakers

– Sophie Maddens
– Claire Sibthorpe

Arguments

Regulatory sandboxes and experimentation are needed along with agility and boldness in trying different approaches

Solutions need to be grounded in the realities and specific needs of different communities rather than one-size-fits-all approaches

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Development

Key takeaways

The digital divide is primarily a demand-side problem rather than a supply-side connectivity issue, with 90% of unconnected people living in areas with mobile broadband coverage but facing other barriers

Device affordability is the biggest barrier to internet access, with entry-level devices costing 99% of monthly income for the poorest 20% in sub-Saharan Africa

Meaningful connectivity requires six interdependent dimensions: quality, availability, affordability, devices, skills, and security – not just basic connection

When meaningful connectivity standards are applied, the number of truly digitally excluded people is closer to 4-4.5 billion rather than the commonly cited 2.6 billion

Education level is the main determinant of internet access and meaningful use, correlating with income and employment opportunities

A diverse telecommunications ecosystem is needed, similar to forest management, with small operators, cooperatives, and social enterprises filling gaps that large operators cannot address economically

Current regulatory frameworks focus too heavily on competition and need to expand to include specific strategies for digital inclusion

The shift toward treating people as consumers rather than citizens with communication rights has contributed to current exclusion patterns

Multi-stakeholder, cross-sectoral collaboration is essential, as no single entity can solve digital inclusion challenges alone

Resolutions and action items

ITU launched the first course in Africa for technical promoters at the community level for capacity building

GSMA created a mobile internet skills training toolkit (Creative Commons) that has trained 75 million people across 40 countries

Universal Postal Union is implementing a project to connect every post office to the Internet and leverage them for digital inclusion

Continued work under South Africa’s G20 presidency to extend meaningful connectivity concepts to include equitable digital inclusion measures

Development of innovative financing models specifically designed for smaller operators and social enterprises rather than traditional capital-focused approaches

Unresolved issues

How to achieve systematic scaling of community networks and social enterprises beyond small pilot projects

Lack of reliable data for measuring digital inclusion progress and device affordability across different regions

High regulatory transaction costs that prevent smaller operators and community services from entering markets

Wholesale access regulation implementation failures across African continent, missing opportunities to reduce backhaul costs

How to address the fundamental ‘extractive economic system’ that underlies digital inequality without just layering solutions on existing structures

Ensuring state responsibility for universal access while supporting community-based solutions without allowing government abdication of duties

Preparing for future pandemic scenarios where collective access solutions (libraries, community centers) may be inaccessible

Suggested compromises

Balancing private sector risk-taking and profit incentives with public interest requirements for digital inclusion

Combining large operator efficiency with small operator innovation through regulatory frameworks that accommodate both

Integrating device refurbishment and circular economy approaches with new device manufacturing to address affordability

Using intermediaries like libraries and post offices to bridge immediate digital exclusion while working toward long-term connectivity solutions

Implementing regulatory sandboxes that allow experimentation with new models while maintaining necessary oversight

Developing whole-of-society approaches that include but don’t rely solely on government intervention

The main barrier to accessing the internet is the cost of the device… But more importantly, what we see is that when even people when people are online or have access to a device, they are unable to use that device very meaningfully.

Speaker

Alison Gillwald

Reason

This comment fundamentally reframes the digital divide discussion by distinguishing between basic connectivity and meaningful use. It challenges the prevailing focus on infrastructure by highlighting that even those with access often cannot use devices effectively due to educational constraints.

Impact

This set the foundational framework for the entire discussion, shifting focus from supply-side (infrastructure) to demand-side constraints. It established the conceptual foundation that other panelists built upon throughout the session.

If you think of connectivity as a jar you’re trying to fill… in every country there are typically two or three or four mobile network operators and they’re like stones you’re trying to fit into that jar… But, in fact, if you fill that jar with water, still more than 50% of it remains empty.

Speaker

Steve Song

Reason

This metaphor brilliantly illustrates why traditional approaches to connectivity are insufficient. It demonstrates how dominant operators, while successful, cannot address the full scope of connectivity needs, making a compelling case for ecosystem diversity.

Impact

This metaphor became a recurring theme, with other speakers referencing the need for diverse solutions and smaller operators. It shifted the conversation toward regulatory frameworks that could accommodate different types of service providers.

I want to go in a different direction… because I think it’s important to actually put a theoretical framing on this question… what I didn’t hear come up is the root causes that lead to exclusion and that lead to inequity. And the root causes, in my view, are the fact that we have an extractive economic system.

Speaker

Dr Gillian Marcelle

Reason

This comment introduced a critical systems-level analysis that challenged the panel to think beyond technical and policy solutions to examine underlying economic structures. It brought historical context and questioned whether incremental solutions could address fundamental inequities.

Impact

This intervention elevated the discussion from tactical solutions to strategic systemic analysis. It prompted other speakers to acknowledge broader structural issues and influenced the conversation toward considering alternative economic models and the need for transformational rather than just transactional approaches.

There are these other models based on socially driven intentions… social enterprises that go beyond those transactional models… They provide social inclusion services, they provide transformational services that at the end of the day create a circular economy, maintain the money locally.

Speaker

Carlos Rey-Moreno

Reason

This comment introduced the crucial distinction between transactional and transformational approaches to connectivity, highlighting how community-based models can address multiple development challenges simultaneously rather than just providing internet access.

Impact

This shifted the discussion toward holistic, community-centered solutions and influenced subsequent conversations about capacity building, local innovation, and the need for regulatory frameworks that support diverse business models.

What I cannot create, I cannot understand… there’s a huge risk when organizations are not involved, when citizens are not involved in that, you get situations… we’re further becoming consumers rather than citizens in this process.

Speaker

Steve Song

Reason

This philosophical insight, referencing Richard Feynman, highlighted the importance of agency and ownership in digital inclusion. It challenged the passive consumer model and emphasized the need for communities to be involved in building, not just receiving, connectivity solutions.

Impact

This comment deepened the discussion about empowerment and self-determination, influencing the conversation toward capacity building for network creation and the importance of technical literacy beyond just usage skills.

We are not going to be any better off than we were, where the last pandemic put the majority of Africans at risk who were unable to digitally substitute both for the health risk and of course the economic risks associated with lockdowns.

Speaker

Alison Gillwald

Reason

This closing comment provided urgent real-world context that demonstrated the life-and-death consequences of digital exclusion. It moved the discussion from abstract policy considerations to concrete human impact, emphasizing the urgency of meaningful connectivity solutions.

Impact

This served as a powerful conclusion that reinforced the entire discussion’s importance and urgency, connecting all the theoretical and policy discussions back to immediate human needs and survival.

Overall assessment

These key comments fundamentally shaped the discussion by progressively deepening and broadening the analysis of digital inclusion challenges. The conversation evolved from identifying problems (device affordability, meaningful use barriers) to proposing systemic solutions (diverse operator ecosystems, community networks) to examining root causes (extractive economic systems) and ultimately connecting back to urgent human needs (pandemic preparedness). The most impactful comments challenged conventional thinking – moving from infrastructure-focused to demand-side approaches, from consumer to citizen models, and from transactional to transformational frameworks. This created a rich, multi-layered discussion that addressed technical, economic, social, and political dimensions of digital equity, with each major intervention building upon previous insights to create a comprehensive analysis of both problems and potential solutions.

How can we systematically scale community networks and social enterprises beyond small pilot projects to achieve meaningful impact?

Speaker

Alison Gillwald

Explanation

There is skepticism about scaling community-based solutions from small training programs to systematic interventions that can address digital inclusion at a population level.

What innovative financing models can support small and localized operators with smaller ticket sizes?

Speaker

Carlos Rey-Moreno

Explanation

Current financial sector models focus on supporting capital interests rather than people’s interests, and there’s a need for innovative financing that understands the needs of smaller actors in telecommunications.

How can we create enabling regulatory environments that reduce barriers for small operators while maintaining quality and security standards?

Speaker

Carlos Rey-Moreno

Explanation

Different countries have vastly different regulatory requirements for telecommunications operators, from simple declarations in Europe to congressional franchises in the Philippines, affecting the ability of small operators to enter the market.

What are the most effective wholesale access regulation models that can be implemented to reduce dominance and increase competition?

Speaker

Alison Gillwald and Steve Song

Explanation

Market reviews have barely been conducted on the African continent, and wholesale access regulation could significantly change the competitive environment and reduce costs, especially for backhaul.

How can we better support intermediary organizations like libraries, post offices, and community centers in their role as digital inclusion facilitators?

Speaker

Kevin Hernandez (UPU representative)

Explanation

These intermediaries play a critical role in helping unconnected people access digital services, but there’s insufficient focus on connecting and supporting these organizations.

What capacity building programs are needed to enable communities to not just use but also build and own networks?

Speaker

Steve Song

Explanation

There’s too much focus on training consumers to use networks but not enough on building capacity for communities to create, understand, and control their own network infrastructure.

How can device refurbishment and circular economy models be scaled to address device affordability systematically?

Speaker

Leandro Navarro

Explanation

There are unused devices with years of lifespan remaining that could be refurbished and provided to those who need them, but this needs to move beyond small projects to systematic solutions.

What transversal digital policies are needed that go beyond telecommunications to address fundamental education and human development challenges?

Speaker

Alison Gillwald

Explanation

Siloed sectoral solutions are insufficient; there’s a need for policies that address the intersection of digital inclusion with education, gender equality, rural development, and other structural inequalities.

How can we shift from treating people as consumers in a market to recognizing them as citizens with rights to communication and access?

Speaker

Dr Gillian Marcelle

Explanation

The fundamental economic system treats people as consumers for profit maximization rather than citizens with rights, which affects how digital inclusion policies are framed and implemented.

What alternative business models beyond traditional for-profit approaches can address the remaining 70% of access gaps?

Speaker

Carlos Rey-Moreno

Explanation

The G20 Digital Investment Infrastructure Initiative noted that stakeholders should think beyond typical for-profit models, but there’s insufficient exploration of what these alternative models look like in practice.