2025 Concordia Annual Summit

The Digital Dilemma: Ensuring Full Access to Crucial Connectivity

  • Advancing Human Rights & Social Progress
Jason Dean, Vivek Badrinath

Session
Partners

Session Summary

Important
Quotations

"58% of the world’s population is now connected through their own device. That still leaves more than three billion people who are not, and 90% of them live in areas covered by broadband technology but remain unconnected. As we move into the AI era, that gap becomes increasingly important to address and to discuss how to close it."
Jason Dean
"But that $30 phone, if you can get it into the hands of those 3.1 billion people, adds about $3 trillion to the global economy, because those phones unlock digital inclusion, access to mobile money, AI, smart agriculture, and more."
Vivek Badrinath

Key
Takeaways

  • The Scale of Digital Divide: 3.4 billion people remain digitally disconnected, mostly in low- and middle-income countries across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, with many living in broadband-covered areas but unable to afford access, making even low-cost technology a significant investment.
  • AI as a Bridge, Not a Barrier: AI can democratize essential services in underserved regions—such as education, healthcare, and agriculture—through localized, language-specific applications, including voice-managed AI for non-English speaking and illiterate populations.
  • The $30 Phone Revolution: Device affordability is the main barrier to digital inclusion, with $30–40 smartphones enabling 1.6 billion people to join the digital economy and potentially adding $3 trillion globally, as entry-level devices support internet access, apps, mobile payments, and multimedia.
  • Multi-Stakeholder Responsibility: Governments, industry, and civil society must collaborate to enable digital access, including removing taxes on affordable devices, ensuring trust and safety through ecosystem partnerships, and adopting ethical AI frameworks with bias-free, tested implementations.

Action
Items

  • For Governments: Remove luxury taxes on smartphones under $140, develop financing frameworks for low-income populations, and collaborate on ethical AI governance while maintaining global technology standards and interoperability
  • For Private Sector: Accelerate affordable smartphone production targeting $30–40 devices, develop local-language AI applications and LLMs, implement comprehensive digital literacy programs, and create innovative financing solutions to expand device access.
  • For International Organizations: Establish funding mechanisms to bridge affordable device gaps, promote global technology standards to preserve economies of scale, and support multi-stakeholder partnerships for comprehensive digital inclusion strategies.
  • For the Technology Industry: Maintain global interoperability standards, prioritize safety and trust through anti-fraud and content verification systems, and focus innovation on practical applications for underserved populations in agriculture, healthcare, and education.
  • Cross-Cutting Priorities: Address the entire digital inclusion chain from devices to content, literacy, and safety, scale successful pilots like Zambian voice AI and Kazakhstan LLMs, and measure impact on economic outcomes and quality of life for newly connected populations.

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