Side event at CSTD 2024-2025 Inter-sessional Panel on 22 October 2024

This lunch event will bring together experts from governments, civil society, academia and research institutions to explore how innovative financing mechanisms for community-centred connectivity can help address persistent digital and developmental divides and how they can be enabled in the WSIS+20 agenda.

The WSIS (2003 and 2005) recognized the need for financing mechanisms to ensure “a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information”. Acknowledging the progress towards achieving that vision, after more than 20 years of deployments in developing countries, and despite the increase in investment from public funding sources, traditional telecommunication and mobile network operators have yet to meet universal access goals.

Within this context, the critical role of community-centred connectivity initiatives is gaining increasing attention as strategies to close the digital gap. These initiatives are driven by completely different investment imperatives, bringing unique assets to the economic calculus of deployment, and have the added advantage of bringing many important social and economic benefits to the community.

While the Tunis agenda clearly stated the importance of “[h]elping to accelerate the development of domestic financial instruments, including by supporting […] networking initiatives based on local communities”, the financial resources and mechanisms have been insufficient to help such initiatives scale to the size of the problem. However, recent years have seen examples of innovative financing mechanisms that are better fit-for-purpose and that could support the full potential of community-centred connectivity in bridging digital divides.

Questions to be addressed:

• What are community-centred connectivity initiatives and how they contribute to diversify economies in a world of accelerated digitalization?
• Are community-centred connectivity initiatives an innovative financing mechanism in themselves, and if so, what can government and financial institutions do to enable them?
• How can the UN’s work on Financing for Development help inform the WSIS+20 Agenda?