EDISON Alliance seeks new commitments for 2025 digital inclusion goal

With two years of work behind it and real progress toward achieving its goals, the EDISON Alliance — a global coalition of private-sector companies, governments, and civil society committed to bridging the digital divide — has become the partner of choice for those committed to supporting digital inclusion.

Even after rapid progress during the COVID-19 pandemic, around 34% of the global population — including many who are already disadvantaged due to poverty, gender, or other barriers — were not using the internet in 2022, leaving them at the margins of global society and the digital economy. In September 2021, EDISON launched its 1 Billion Lives Challenge — focusing on digital delivery of health, education, and financial services.

EDISON champions across the private and public sectors, including leaders from Verizon, Apollo Hospitals, and the United Nations Development Programme, aim to reach one billion individuals with connectivity by the end of 2025. With just under three years left to achieve the ambitious goal, the Alliance has positively impacted 454 million people with over 250 initiatives across 90 countries, according to its first Impact Report. Achievements include:

• 280 million people are now connected to e-banking, mobile wallets, e-payments, and other financial services;

• 90 million individuals are now able to access digital health care services such as telehealth platforms; and

• 18 million gaining access to online learning and job skills training.

Still, there is more work to be done. Although 95% of the world’s population lives in areas covered by mobile broadband networks, as many as 2.7 billion people still lack the devices, digital skills, or financial means to make use of the technology.

“You ask yourself, why? What's the problem?” said Hans Vestberg, CEO and chair of Verizon and chair of the EDISON Alliance, at the 2023 Global Inclusive Growth Summit in Washington D.C. in April. “The problem is that when you think about connectivity, you need to think in three pieces: accessibility to the technology, affordability of the technology, and the usability of the technology.”

“It’s really a rounded kind of effort when we talk about digital inclusion and one that goes far beyond just infrastructure,” Robert Opp, chief digital officer at UNDP, said on UNDP’s and EDISON Alliance’s joint work.

Credible solutions targeting structural barriers

During this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Rima Qureshi, chief strategy officer at Verizon and EDISON’s deputy chair, credited the successes of the 1 Billion Lives challenge to the Alliance’s focus on concrete commitments and credible solutions.

Of the three barriers, affordability is currently the toughest challenge, Qureshi said. Mobilizing governments and their private-sector partners to develop solutions is a key objective for the Alliance, she added.

Reducing costs for digital health care will also require the use of digital tools to be scaled up more widely, Shobana Kamineni, executive vice chairperson of Apollo Hospitals in India and an EDISON Alliance board member, told Devex. “Every health care provider is thinking about how they can become more productive in this respect,” she said.

Usability is also a stubborn barrier that requires innovation. “How do you ensure that there are local applications, in the local language, that are able to meet the needs of everyone?” asked Qureshi.

“It’s when all three are addressed that a person can be digitally included in our society,” said Vestberg.

Mobilizing public-private partnerships

Examples of successful collaborations include a partnership between EDISON Alliance member Apollo Hospitals and the Himachal Pradesh state authorities in northern India, which have set up telemedicine centers serving communities in remote, mountainous locations. Apollo Telemedicine Networking Foundation has also partnered with American Tower Corporation in a pilot project that has launched five digital dispensaries providing primary, preventive, and specialized teleconsultation services to 250,000 people across 200 villages in Madhya Pradesh state in central India.

While private companies can access large commercial networks, the public sector is well placed to build trust in communities and have a deep understanding of local needs, Vestberg said.

To tap into governments' knowledge and reach, the EDISON Alliance has started working with a series of “Lighthouse Countries” that so far include Bahrain, Bangladesh, and Rwanda. These countries act as accelerators, leveraging the full power of the EDISON Alliance as they make concerted efforts to reduce digital divides at the country level. The idea is that these become a showcase to prospective government members of what can be achieved by working with the Alliance.

“Part of the work at EDISON Alliance is not only to see that we are reaching our goal, it’s actually also to spread best practices,” said Vestberg.

With the right partnerships and resources, “we could have every person on the planet connect and meaningfully participate in society by 2030. That is an achievable goal,” said Derek O’Halloran, a member of the WEF’s Executive Committee and head of its Future of Digital Economy & New Value Creation initiative. “We wanted to demonstrate that through the power of collective action and supporting each other.”

UNDP’s Opp agreed that the connections being made between organizations through the platform have played a key role in the Alliance’s success to date. “As a U.N. agency, we can provide a certain amount of support for our country partners and our civil society partners around the world,” he said. “But we know, particularly when it comes to digital technology, we cannot do that without partnership and participation from stakeholders like private sector companies. … The EDISON Alliance is really a platform that brings those voices together and tries to channel and organize the responses and commitments that we've all made in ways that will unlock and amplify what we all do.”

Get involved

The EDISON Alliance’s next goal is to galvanize more companies, governments, and organizations to join the movement and to generate a fresh wave of partner commitments and projects aimed squarely at those top challenges. With each partner playing to their strengths and learning from the experiences of their peers, the Alliance is confident that progress toward its 2025 goal will swiftly accelerate.

“We have two-and-a-half years left; we’re going to run it to the end, and we’re going to see that 1 billion more people are getting connected,” Vestberg said.