Connect

Until recently, Daniel B. Cavalcanti was the Coordinator for Digital and Telecommunications Policy at the Ministry of Communications for Brazil. He led the G20 Digital Economy Working Group (DEWG) during the G20 presidency of Brazil (2024), which reached consensus on key issues in today’s digital economy, from new indicators for the measurement of “meaningful connectivity” to AI readiness and capacity assessment. These issues will continue to be a focus under South Africa’s G20 presidency in 2025.

Zimbabwe and Uzbekistan represent standout examples from two different continents in the quest to achieve school connectivity amid competing national priorities.

In an increasingly digital world, access to the internet is becoming an essential tool for our personal, social and economic development. Yet, for many, this is still out of reach. Today, millions of children around the globe, lack connectivity, creating a barrier to their access to educational and other opportunities. This is a digital divide: a gap that reinforces social and economic inequalities, leaving too many children behind.

Today is the first step in the activation of the Giga Connectivity Centre, a hub for global efforts geared towards connecting schools to the internet.

Giga is hosting a series of hackathons starting in January 2025, to build on its open source solutions for bridging the digital divide. The hackathon series, implemented by NewNative, a community platform dedicated to advancing AI innovation, aims to accelerate Giga’s connectivity efforts by fostering collaborative problem-solving among AI scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and civil society actors.

The Giga Technology Centre in Barcelona recently hosted the second Government Technology Exchange Programme (GTEP), a four-day focus on the tools and services developed by Giga to facilitate school connectivity.

Global internet connectivity saw steady but uneven progress in 2024, according to the latest edition of “Measuring digital development: Facts and Figures 2024,” an annual compendium of the most important ICT indicators gathered by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN agency for digital technology.