Building and nurturing women’s digital leadership
Thinking back over my long career at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), I remember arriving at my first-ever ITU Women’s Breakfast at the 1993 Regional Telecommunication Development Conference for Asia and the Pacific in Singapore.
This popular initiative, pioneered by a dear friend and colleague, Walda Roseman, became such a fixture at key ITU meetings over the past 25+ years. Female delegates got to meet and network with other women in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector. It was especially valuable when we were much scarcer in number.
Today, after a year without face-to-face meetings, those opportunities seem far away.
Mar 5, 2021
High costs for Internet access relative to income remain one of the main barriers to the use of information and communication technology (ICT) services worldwide – and this is particularly true in emerging markets.
This is according to a new policy brief from ITU and the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) which finds that, taking income differences into account, a mobile broadband subscription with at least 1,5Gb of data costs around four times more in developing countries than in developed ones.
“The affordability of ICT services 2020” analyses five categories, namely mobile broadband, fixed broadband, mobile data and voice low-usage, mobile data and voice high-usage, and mobile cellular low usage. Service prices in all five categories continued a slow but steady decline over the past year.
4G now available to 85 per cent of the global population….
… but only half can afford to pay for mobile Internet access
Costs are falling but only slightly and far too slowly
Digital inequality remains a massive globally divisive problem
Almost half the people on the planet with access to a 4G network don t use their smartphones to access the mobile Internet because it costs too much, thus negating the main value and purpose of having a handset capable of providing web access in the first place.
A new co-authored policy briefing from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in collaboration with the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) makes it clear that the high price of mobile Internet access relative to the low incomes and minimal discretionary spending that are the dismal norm in many parts of the developing world is a major barrier to personal, local, regional and national social and economic development. In many parts of the world the cost of accessing i
High cost of access keeping developing regions offline - ITU developingtelecoms.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from developingtelecoms.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A new policy brief from ITU and the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), finds that high costs for Internet access relative to income remain one of.