There is a number that doesn’t appear in enough headlines: 2.2 billion. That is how many people have no internet connection. No, we are not talking about the slow internet, or cheap Internet, but none. According to the ITU Facts and Figures 2025, roughly six billion people are online. The remaining 2.2 billion are not, and almost all of them live in low- and middle-income countries.
We spend a lot of time talking about what technology can do. Self-driving cars. AI that writes code and diagnoses illness. Platforms that connect billions of people across languages and time zones. The conversation is almost always about capability. What the technology enables, how fast it’s improving, where it’s heading next. Less often do we ask a more fundamental question: who gets to use any of this?
The term “digital divide” is not new. It appeared in the late 20th century to describe the gap between those who could afford a phone and those who couldn’t. But the term has aged poorly, becoming far more complex. Today, it does not just describe who has a connection. It describes who has a voice, education, a job, access to healthcare, and increasingly, who gets to participate in the most important technological shift in a generation.
The Geography of Disconnection
Let’s start with the basics. According to the Brookings Institution, internet penetration stands at 89% in Europe, over 80% in the Americas, and 70% in the Arab States. In Asia, it drops to 61%. In Africa, it falls to 40%.
The urban-rural split is especially sharp. According to DevelopmentAid, in 2023, 81% of people living in cities had internet access, compared to 50% in rural areas. In a world where remote work, digital health services, e-commerce, and online education have all accelerated, that 31-point gap functions as a wall.
There is also a gender dimension that rarely makes the top of the conversation. The ITU 2025 report finds there are 280 million more men connected than women, creating an imbalance concentrated mainly in the world’s poorest countries. And then there is the question of what kind of connection people actually have. While 5G covers 84% of people in high-income countries, it reaches only 4% in low-income countries.
The Divide Within the Divide
It would be a mistake to frame this as purely a story about rich countries versus poor ones. The fault lines run inside borders, too.
In the United States, a country that is digitally advanced, rural communities still struggle with connectivity. In South Africa, according to the Global Digital Inclusion Partnership, only 28% of households in informal settlements have internet access, compared to 74% in formal urban areas. When that country’s government held a public consultation on data policy in 2023, input came overwhelmingly from organized urban sectors; informal communities, lacking access, had virtually no voice in decisions that would shape their digital futures.
Age matters too. The OECD finds that, on average, people aged 16–24 are 16% more likely to have used the internet than those aged 55–74, and those with higher educational attainment are 15% more likely to be online than those without. The digital divide compounds other inequalities and deepens the already existing disadvantage.
Here is where the conversation usually goes wrong. We talk about access, infrastructure, connectivity, and devices as if getting someone online solves the problem. It doesn’t. Simply giving someone a computer or a smartphone is not sufficient. As DevelopmentAid notes, users also require appropriate infrastructure, resources, and training. For example, in rural Brazil, significant numbers of new internet users report difficulty navigating online platforms because they’ve never been taught how. Access without literacy is like giving someone a library card with no ability to read.
Affordability is another layer. According to a 2025 analysis, in Nigeria, a basic smartphone costs around $100, while the average monthly income is $150. In that context, buying a device becomes a significant financial decision. Data costs add another recurring burden. Even when infrastructure exists, the economics make consistent use difficult or impossible for much of the world’s population. The result is a multi-dimensional exclusion: no device, no connection, no skills, and no affordable path to any of the three. Each layer makes the next harder to solve.
The AI Acceleration
If the original digital divide was about who could get online, the current one is about who can use the tools being built there. And those tools are moving fast. A UNDP report warns that AI has reached 1.2 billion users in just 3 years, with nearly 70% in developing countries. In some high-income economies, two-thirds of people already use AI tools. In many low-income countries, usage remains close to 5%.
Microsoft’s AI Diffusion Report for H2 2025 confirms the gap is widening: adoption in the Global North grew nearly twice as fast as in the Global South. Today, 24.7% of the working-age population in the Global North uses generative AI tools, compared to only 14.1% in the Global South. Of the ten countries with the largest increases in AI adoption, all are high-income economies.
This is not just a consumer technology story. AI is reshaping hiring, healthcare, education, financial services, and governance. Those who know how to use it gain leverage. Those who don’t (or can’t) fall further behind. As the World Economic Forum notes, the ability to work effectively with AI is becoming a new marker of class distinction. Schools in lower-income areas, particularly across the Global South, lack the infrastructure, teachers, and resources to prepare students for careers where this skill matters most.
The structural risks go even further. A UN report by UNCTAD finds that just 100 companies, mostly in the United States and China, account for 40% of the world’s private investment in AI research and development. Meanwhile, 118 countries (most from the Global South) are absent from global AI governance discussions altogether. The technology is being built by a few, for a few, with the rest largely absent from the conversation about what it should do and how it should be governed.
Who Is Responsible?
Governments have a clear role in the current imbalance. Infrastructure investment, digital literacy programs, and regulatory frameworks that prevent monopolization of key technologies are all within reach of state action. Countries like Estonia, South Korea, Finland, and Singapore have demonstrated that treating digital access as a public priority delivers real results.
Several countries have demonstrated that market-oriented approaches can dramatically expand digital access. Kenya leapfrogged traditional banking by allowing Safaricom to launch M-Pesa in a lightly regulated mobile market. India saw data prices collapse by ~95% after Reliance Jio entered with aggressive pricing, forcing incumbents to compete. Estonia built near-universal connectivity by minimizing regulations and allowing private investment to flourish within a smart, interoperable framework. Rwanda attracted foreign telecom operators through spectrum liberalization and a business-friendly environment. In the Philippines and Bangladesh, private demand for remittance-linked mobile services organically drove network expansion into rural areas. Chile’s open, competitively auctioned spectrum market made it consistently one of Latin America’s most connected countries.
Beyond individual country cases, a set of replicable tools has proven effective: PPPs where local governments contribute rights-of-way or dark fiber while private operators invest capital have helped reach neighborhoods that pure market logic wouldn’t serve. Competitive spectrum auctions with coverage obligations, performance-tied subsidies, and low-cost device and data mandates have all lowered barriers to access without requiring direct state provision. The state that drives competition, reduces gatekeeping, prevents incumbent abuse, and occasionally de-risks the last mile, while leaving investment and innovation to the private sector.
Access to technology is not primarily a matter of engineered fairness or redistribution. Every mind locked out of the digital world represents a profound loss to all of humanity. In other words, if we don’t remove barriers to voluntary exchange, we limit human potential and development on a global scale.
The most effective path to overcome that is by competitive markets, secure property rights, light-touch regulation, and private investment. Because only through greater liberty can the technological revolution become one of history’s greatest expansions of human opportunity.
* Tetiana Rak is the Chief Operations Officer (COO) at We Are Innovation. A journalist and freedom activist with 8 years of experience, Tania has worked with renowned media outlets including CNN, TechCrunch, Fox News, HackerNoon, the BBC, and Radio Free Europe, among others. Her unwavering dedication to championing the ideas of technological advancements and global digital transformations has earned her a distinguished reputation in the field. Through her work, Tania promotes the ideas of liberty and individual rights as a cornerstone of any rights-respecting society. Strengthened by the experience of war in Ukraine, Tania’s beliefs also stand for promoting technological advancements as a transformative tool to advance liberty, giving people the opportunity to speak, act, and pursue happiness without unnecessary external restrictions.
Source: We Are Innovation
