Synopsis: Introduces the Digital Dispatch series, which brings together civil society voices to share challenges, practices and lessons for advancing digital justice, meaningful access and collaboration.
The digital divide is defined as the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern information and communication technology (ICT) and those with restricted or no access. Despite global advancements in digital infrastructure, the Global South continues to experience critical challenges in ensuring last-mile digital access. As per the International Telecommunication Union, 2.6 billion people globally remain unconnected to the internet, the majority of whom are concentrated in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). High-income countries are approaching universal access with nearly 93% already connected whereas only 27% are online in low income countries (ITU, 2024).
Even among those who are nominally connected, meaningful connectivity which means regular, safe, affordable, and effective access to digital technologies, is severely limited. This digital exclusion exacerbates existing social inequalities, including income poverty, gender digital divides, and violations of fundamental rights such as access to information, digital education, and civic participation in many regions.
The divide becomes stark between urban and rural regions. Globally, 85% of urban dwellers use the Internet in 2025, compared to just over half of the rural population. In high-income countries, the gap in urban-rural Internet usage is nearly closed (94% Internet use), whereas in low-income countries only 14% of rural residents are online (ITU, 2025).
If we specifically look at low- and middle-income countries, the gender gap in mobile internet adoption has narrowed slightly in 2025. Still, women remain 12% less likely than men to use mobile internet with around 200 million fewer women than men online. More importantly, two-thirds of the 810 million women globally who remain unconnected live in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The gender disparities within mobile and smartphone ownership have also remained largely unchanged in 2025, at 7% and 13%, respectively (GSMA, 2026). As women are also not a homogeneous group, some remain more at risk than others. For instance, amongst women who live in the low and middle-income countries, the rural-urban divide also becomes more apparent. In 2025, across all LMICs, the gender gap in mobile internet adoption was more than three times wider in rural areas than in urban areas (GSMA, 2026).
Latest figures show that the limited digital access of women across Africa, Asia, and Latin America has already cost an estimated $1.2 trillion in economic value, and could cost an additional $511 billion in economic value without gender responsive action (GDIP, 2026). In addition, there also remains a significant gap in data and research about how the digital divide impacts gender diverse populations on a global scale.
To address many of these issues, civil society organisations have extensively worked towards ensuring technological progress reaches the communities it means to serve. In doing so, they have gone beyond promoting access to facilitating and building alternative community networks, conducting large-scale research, making toolkits, amplifying community voices, offering legal support and livelihood amongst other things. However, there is a need for many of these organisations to come together, support and amplify each other’s work and share learnings and resources necessary across different contexts to bridge the divide faster and more meaningfully.
The digital dispatch series brings together voices of many organisations across the global majority countries through podcasts and articles on how they are working towards digital justice, media and information literacy, and meaningful access to further sustainable development. Each article is based on an interview with an organisation and explores the challenges they face in the region, the opportunities they identify, the existing policies that hinder progress, the work they are undertaking, and the support they need to strengthen their impact. By reflecting on what has worked, what has not, and what lies ahead, the series shares the complex and evolving nature of the contemporary digital landscape. The series aims to serve as a space for knowledge exchange, enable readers to draw contextual lessons from diverse experiences, while also connecting with organisations working towards digital inclusion.
Through this initiative, GDEN aims to overcome digital inequality through a collaborative cross-border framework. By working at the intersection of policy, research, and practice, GDEN advances a vision of digital empowerment as a global public good.
References
Global Digital Inclusion Partnership. (2026). Beyond resilience: The rising cost of digital exclusion for women in the Global Majority. https://globaldigitalinclusion.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GDIP-Global-Synthesis-Report.pdf
GSMA. (2026). The mobile gender gap report 2026. https://www.gsma.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/The-Mobile-Gender-Gap-Report-2026.pdf
International Telecommunication Union. (2024). Measuring digital development: Facts and figures 2024. https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/facts-figures-2024/
International Telecommunication Union. (2025, October 15). Internet use in urban and rural areas. https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2025/10/15/ff25-internet-use-in-urban-and-rural-areas/