…As AT&T Tops Chart With $5Bn
The United Nations disclosed on Monday that it had raked in $4.8 billion in new pledges towards closing the global digital connectivity gap, bringing total pledges to over $50 billion.
Available data from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) on the global connectivity rate currently shows that about 2.6 billion people, or one-third of the global population, remained offline in 2023.
Commenting on the latest digital connectivity drive’s funding feat the ITU’s chief, Doren Bogdan-Martin, said: “Closing the digital divide requires a team effort, and today we scored a huge win for global connectivity.”
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 digitalisation can provides.
In 2021, the ITU launched the Partner2Connect Digital Coalition, with the aim of using public-private partnerships to help increase digitalisation in the world’s hardest-to-connect communities.
The UN telecom agency had then set a target of raising $100 billion by 2026, and ITU hailed Monday 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 as the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), being hosted by the ITU kicked off on Monday in Geneva.
Among the new commitments was a $3 billion pledge from US telecom giant AT&T.
AT&T, 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.
Similarly, the Canadian government pledged $1.46 billion towards investment in computing infrastructure to support artificial intelligence (AI) businesses and researchers in the country just as it
also committed to spend an additional $292 million to among other things help facilitate the adoption of AI across the country’s economy, and to create a new Canadian AI Safe Institute to examine and protect against the risks of advanced AI systems.
The pledges also showed that And Elle International made three pledges worth a total of $106 million to help improve the quality of life of 20 million women and girls in South Africa through the provision of digital platforms, smart solutions, data and AI models.
In his remarks, Bogdan-Martin, noted that “because of the leadership, vision and ambition of P2C’s pledgers, millions of people will be given the opportunity to have more accessible, more affordable digital technologies for socioeconomic growth, improved health and everything that makes connectivity meaningful.”
