Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review
UN hails $4.8 bln in new pledges to boost global connectivity
The United Nations has said that it had raked in $4.8 billion in new pledges towards closing the global digital divide, bringing total pledges to over $50 billion.
Around 2.6 billion people, or one-third of the global population, remained offline in 2023, according to data from the International Telecommunications Union, the U.N.’s telecoms agency.
“Closing the digital divide requires a team effort, and today we scored a huge win for global connectivity,” ITU chief Doreen Bogdan-Martin said in a statement.
The ITU has been leading efforts to rectify a situation where a third of the world’s population has never connected to the internet, and is being left out of the advantages that digitalization can provide.
In 2021, the Geneva-based U.N. agency launched the Partner2Connect Digital Coalition, with the aim of using publicprivate partnerships to help increase digitalization in the world’s hardest-to-connect communities.
It has set a target of raising $100 billion by 2026, and ITU hailed on May 27 that it was now more than halfway to that goal, with a total of $50.96 billion in pledges so far.
The new pledges were announced on the first day of this year’s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), being hosted by the ITU in Geneva this week.
Among the new commitments was a $3-billion-pledge from U.S. telecom giant AT&T.
The company, which had previously pledged $2 billion to the project, vowed to help 25 million people in the hardest-to-connect areas of the United States to get and stay connected by 2030.