Despite 96 percent of the world’s population living within reach of mobile broadband networks, nearly 3 billion people (38 percent of global population) are still offline (ITU 2024). In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), this digital divide is even greater. New data from the Global Findex Digital Connectivity Tracker 2025 reveals that, in 81 of the 123 LMICs, approximately 1.4 billion adults do not use the Internet - about 43% of the adult population in these countries. Of these, 800 million are women, underscoring the gendered dimensions of the digital divide. The implications of this exclusion extend far beyond the Internet. Digital connectivity has become a powerful enabler of economic growth, poverty reduction, and job creation in LMICs (Hjort et al 2025). Digital connectivity enhances financial inclusion (Roessler et al 2023), expands access to flexible employment opportunities (Ho et al 2024), and significantly increases labor force participation, especially among women (Chiplunkar et al 2022).
Coverage gaps have narrowed considerably
Investments in digital infrastructure are paying off: many LMICs now have near-universal broadband coverage. Still, there remain a number of countries lacking this crucial infrastructure across all regions, particularly more rural areas.
Connected Networks, Disconnected People
However, coverage gaps are far from the full picture. Even if people live within broadband coverage, a large share of the global population still do not use the Internet or digital services. The cost of getting online, limited digital literacy, and the lack of relevant digital content can all contribute to this usage gap (Chen et al 2021).
The Gender Gap
Women in some LMICs are less likely to own smartphones, make data purchases, or use digital services than men. This gender gap is driven by factors including unequal access to financial resources, lower digital literacy, concerns about safety and privacy, and gendered social norms that may limit women from benefiting from digital technologies.
In the sample of 81 countries, nearly half a billion adult women who live in broadband covered areas but do not use the Internet are in just five countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. In many southeast Asian economies and countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, gender gaps in Internet use are minimal, or more women use the Internet than men do. Reasons for these vary across countries and often reflect societal norms towards women, but systematic evidence on underlying mechanisms for these patterns is absent.
What can be done to tackle digital exclusion?
Policymakers have three different hypothetical levers to tackle digital exclusion: increase coverage, increase usage, or decrease gender gaps. The World Bank’s Gender and Inclusion in Digital and AI team ran a scenario-based analysis that reveals the quantitative results of each of the three approaches. These scenarios rely on strong assumptions, modeling the limits of what is possible when policies are perfectly implemented.
While hypothetical, the scenario models show the potential maximum gains from gender-neutral and gender-focused interventions, revealing how many additional women would come online if they adopted the Internet at the same rate as men.
Breaking Barriers to Women’s Connectivity
As shown in Scenario 3, more than 200 million women remain excluded not because networks are unavailable, or due to gender-neutral constraints on usage, but due to constraints that may disproportionately affect women, including restrictive social norms and less access to financial resources for making device and data purchases. Addressing these barriers will require targeted interventions beyond infrastructure expansion and generic affordability measures. These can include public Internet access points designed to meet women’s needs, targeted consumer financing or subsidies to help women access smartphones and data, women’s digital literacy programs that help to build digital skills, online safety programs, as well as social norms interventions that engage gatekeepers and help to increase women’s access to digital devices and the Internet. Together, these targeted actions can help ensure that women are not just connected but truly empowered to participate fully in the digital world.
This data story is based on a note by Antonio Martins-Neto, Sharada Srinivasan, Sylvan Rene Herskowitz and Yuna Liang: Access, Use, and Gender Gaps: The Geography of Digital Exclusion in Low, and Middle-Income Countries