A digital ladder for the 2 billion people still offline: cheaper connections, real skills, shared AI

More than 2 billion people are still offline, and in low-income countries only 23% of people use the internet, against 94% in rich ones. The World Bank Group has now set out its first-ever digital strategy to close that gap, built on four simple ideas: build connections all the way to homes, schools and clinics; make phones and data cheaper; give people digital ID, payments and skills they can use for work; and share practical AI tools — like crop-disease spotting and help for health workers — instead of leaving them to the richest countries. A companion initiative will let governments in places like Africa and Latin America rent shared, pay-as-you-go computing power, so a small country does not need to build a supercomputer to use AI.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: institutional program