Technology & Digital Divide: Crisis Map in 2026

Gaza continues to face a severe communications crisis driven by the destruction of telecommunications infrastructure, repeated network outages, and chronic power constraints. The World Bank’s 2025 Interim Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment says Gaza’s ICT infrastructure has suffered **US$164 million** in damages, with about **74% of assets completely destroyed**, **16% partially damaged**, and **10% minimally damaged**, producing a major breakdown in communication services and internet connectivity. UN and World Bank reporting also says Gaza residents have largely lost access to essential communication services, including mobile and internet connectivity needed for emergency response and life-saving coordination. The crisis has broad humanitarian and economic effects. A Gaza digital-economy report found recurring blackouts have cut people off from work, education, income, and the outside world, and a survey of **183** Gaza-based digital workers found **81%** were aged 18-34, **72%** were displaced, and most had lost over half their earnings. The World Bank estimates the Gaza economy contracted by **86%** in H1 2024 and that the conflict has pushed the Palestinian territories into deep recession, underscoring how telecom failure compounds wider collapse across displacement, banking, schooling, and humanitarian operations.

Latin America and the Caribbean still faces a major rural digital divide, with the latest regional household data showing that in 2022 only 67.3% of households had fixed internet access, far below the OECD benchmark of 91.1%. The gap is much wider for poorer households, where access was 46.4%, versus 84.6% for wealthier households, underscoring that income remains a strong predictor of connectivity. The rural deficit is especially severe: urban households in the region had 74.8% access compared with just 35.8% in rural areas, and some countries had rural access below 20%. World Bank analysis also reports that in LAC fixed broadband is often unaffordable, with 56% of households unable to afford fixed broadband and 45% to 52% unable to afford cellular services, while rural populations and women are less likely to be connected. Recent IICA analysis estimated that 72 million rural inhabitants in 26 countries still lack connectivity that meets minimum quality standards, even though rural connectivity improved by about 7 percentage points from 2020 to 2022.

Europe’s rural digital divide remains a major inequality problem, with underserved and thinly populated regions still lagging in broadband quality, digital skills, and access to e-government services. Recent European policy materials say the gap continues to cut across geography, income, age, and education, and that rural and underserved regions still lack fast, reliable networks and basic digital skills needed for everyday online tasks. The most recent evidence also shows the divide is not just about access: low-income households, older people, and people with lower education levels remain less able to use digital public services, while rural regions continue to face weaker broadband coverage than urban areas. European cohesion reporting says wide disparities persist across the EU and that the rural-urban gap in very-high-capacity network access remains unresolved.

Pacific Island states continue to face a **major digital divide**, with persistent gaps in internet access, affordability, and digital skills limiting participation in education, health, finance, and public services. Recent regional analysis says Pacific Island Countries are at a pivotal moment in digital transformation, but connectivity remains uneven and many communities still cannot access affordable, reliable broadband outside capital cities. UNESCO and UNCTAD reporting indicates that the Pacific still sits below global digital-development levels, with fixed broadband access around **8% of the population** and connectivity costs often **up to four times higher than in the rest of the world**; in some cases, broadband can absorb **10% to 20% of monthly income**. UNCTAD also reports that in **Papua New Guinea**, a mobile broadband package can cost **nearly 20% of average monthly income**, making internet use unaffordable for many households. The problem is especially severe in rural and remote islands, where high infrastructure costs, fragmented geography, and limited digital skills continue to exclude people from online services and economic opportunities.

Papua New Guinea’s internet access problem worsened after the National Information and Communications Technology Authority (NICTA) instructed Starlink to cease service on 11 December 2025, and Starlink disabled service on 16 December 2025 while the licensing dispute remained unresolved. The shutdown affected businesses, healthcare providers, schools, and remote communities that had depended on satellite broadband as one of the few practical connectivity options in rural areas. The disruption is especially significant in Papua New Guinea because internet access remains limited overall, with coverage described as weak in rural and remote regions and national internet penetration around 24.1% in the current background materials. In April 2026, PNG’s National Court reportedly ruled that the Ombudsman Commission had exceeded its powers, which the Lowy Institute said likely cleared the way for Starlink licensing to proceed again, but the earlier shutdown had already left a major access gap and the implementation timeline remained uncertain.

Central Asia continues to face a major digital divide, with the biggest gaps now less about basic network rollout and more about whether people in rural and remote areas can actually afford and use mobile internet and broadband services. GSMA estimated that around 45 million people across eight Central Asia and South Caucasus countries were using mobile internet, but nearly 50 million remained unconnected, with the usage gap in 2022 especially severe in Georgia and Turkmenistan. Recent ITU data show that the urban-rural gap persists across the wider CIS region: in 2024, 95% of urban residents were online versus 85% in rural areas, and 7% of the rural population had no possibility of accessing the Internet at all. The same report found 5G coverage in urban areas but zero rural 5G coverage in the CIS region, while 4G covered all urban residents but only 83% of rural residents. World Bank analysis continues to identify Central Asia’s limited and costly high-speed internet, low fixed broadband penetration, and weak rural connectivity as barriers to education, jobs, healthcare, and access to public services, with the unconnected disproportionately concentrated in rural and remote communities.

A series of undersea cable faults in May 2024 disrupted internet connectivity across East Africa, especially on the SEACOM and EASSy systems that link the region to South Africa and global cloud infrastructure. Internet Society reported that the damaged cables were repaired by 3 June 2024, but the outages showed how dependent several East African countries remain on a small number of international routes. The most affected countries included Burundi, Malawi, Mozambique, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, with Cloudflare reporting traffic drops of roughly 10–25% in Kenya, Uganda, Madagascar, and Mozambique, and one-third or more in Rwanda, Malawi, and Tanzania during the outage period. Reporting from the region also described knock-on effects on mobile money, banking, education platforms, emergency communications, and paid remote work, though no country experienced a complete national internet shutdown because alternative submarine, terrestrial, and cache routes remained available.

Rural sub-Saharan Africa continues to face a severe digital infrastructure gap driven by weak last-mile broadband, limited fixed networks, unreliable electricity, and high affordability barriers. The World Bank reported that at the end of 2021, 84% of people in sub-Saharan Africa lived in areas with 3G coverage and 63% had 4G coverage, yet only 22% were using mobile internet; it also found that 61% lived within broadband range but did not use it, showing a large coverage-to-usage gap. The Broadband Commission’s 2025 report adds that 160 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are still not covered by mobile internet networks, and that the region’s median price for a 2 GB monthly mobile broadband plan was 4.2% of GNI per capita in 2024, above the 2% affordability target. The rural disadvantage remains especially pronounced. The Broadband Commission reported that in 2024, 23% of rural households in Africa had internet access compared with 57% of urban households, while the World Bank found that internet access in sub-Saharan Africa was 47% in urban areas versus 12% in rural areas in its sample. A 2025 analysis also notes that more than 600 million people in Africa still lack access to electricity, which remains a foundational barrier to digital access, and that rural internet use across Africa was only 23% in 2024 versus 57% in urban areas. Recent guidance from the ITU and World Bank continues to emphasize that power shortages, difficult terrain, poor road access, and limited local electricity supply are restricting rural ICT rollout. The problem affects much of the region, with especially strong constraints in Western and Central Africa and in remote rural areas across Eastern and Southern Africa, where coverage and usage gaps remain large. The current evidence suggests the situation is still serious and persistent rather than rapidly improving, because infrastructure rollout is happening, but adoption, affordability, and power constraints remain binding.

Rural America continues to face a persistent digital inclusion gap driven by both broadband access and device ownership, and the problem remains consequential as work, schooling, health care, and public services increasingly require strong digital skills. Pew Research reported that in 2021, 72% of rural adults had home broadband, below suburban and urban peers, and only 30% of rural adults had all four key devices/services needed to go online regularly: a desktop or laptop, a smartphone, home broadband, and a tablet. NTIA’s earlier analysis also found that rural residents were more likely than urban residents to lack any Internet-compatible device, underscoring that access problems are not limited to broadband alone. Recent research and reporting show the gap is still large in access and use. A University of Michigan review cited that rural areas had substantially less broadband availability than urban areas, with 65% of people in rural areas having access compared with 97% in urban areas, and reported that fixed internet subscriptions remained lower in rural areas than in suburbs. Harvard Business School research using 40 million Windows devices across more than 28,000 U.S. ZIP codes found that rural ZIP codes lagged urban ZIP codes in computer use, with a media consumption and computing index of 0.19 in urban ZIP codes versus -0.27 in rural ZIP codes, indicating a continuing digital skills and usage gap relevant to AI literacy. The problem is concentrated in rural regions across the United States, including places with lower broadband adoption and communities that face structural disadvantages such as tribal lands and the rural Black South.

India’s smartphone access has improved, but a substantial rural-urban divide remains. MoSPI’s 2025 Comprehensive Modular Survey on Telecom reported that 85.5% of Indian households possessed at least one smartphone, while rural households still lagged urban households on smartphone ownership, internet access within the home, and mobile-phone ownership among women and older age groups. The gap is also visible in telecom penetration data. Ookla reported that in the first half of 2025, mobile penetration was 58.8% in rural India versus 125.3% in urban India, a 66.5 percentage-point difference. Bihar, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, and Jharkhand remained among the lowest-penetration regions, showing that access gaps are still structurally concentrated in poorer and rural-heavy areas. Recent survey evidence also shows that while rural youth are close to urban youth on smartphone ownership and internet use, access remains uneven across gender and geography, with rural women and older adults still less likely to own phones or use smartphones. These disparities continue to constrain reliable access to education, finance, and digital public services in low-income regions.