Benchmark of digital inclusion initiatives

Digital inclusion and development of social progress

Half of humanity still lives on the fringe of the digital world, without access to the internet. Globally, a quarter of children under the age of five have never been registered at birth¹ they have no proof of their legal identity to protect their rights and ensure universal access to social services. Digital players therefore have an important role to play in terms of digital inclusion and the development of social progress.

In its strategic plan, our client, an international operator, has expressed its ambition to contribute to digital equality in countries where the brand is present, with associated means objectives. To address these issues, a "digital inclusion" program has been launched across the operator. This program aims to better define, prioritize and organize actions.

Currently, many initiatives exist. However, they are not always sufficiently coordinated and sometimes too small in scale.

Our client therefore asked our Market Intelligence experts to:

• Provide a clear and synthetic vision of digital inclusion topic elaboration and the structuring of player ecosystems in the targeted areas,
• Deepen the initiatives of the main digital inclusion players in these areas and identify their best-practices in terms of organization and governance (coordination and piloting of initiatives at an international level), financing and communication
• Audit the indicators for reducing digital inequalities in order to identify those that will enable Orange to prioritize its ambitions and monitor the progress of actions taken.

A global benchmark covering different players

Our team set up a system composed of 5 lots carried out in parallel over a period of several months:

• 1st lot: implement an international benchmark assessing digital inclusion issues, mapping of the main players, whether from the ICT industry or not.

• 2nd, 3rd and 4th lots: focus on 3 main regions: France, Europe and the MEA region

         - for each region, prepare a report of digital inclusion issues, map the main players (ICT and non-ICT) with a sheet detailed by player

        - all regions combined, 20 players were studied and the sheets were compiled in a database.

• 5th lot: inventory and detailed description of indicators for reducing digital inequalities, comparative analysis and recommendations, qualification of a database and sheets for 5 indicators

Our experts then made a synthesis of all the lots and gave recommendations, taking into account our client's existing actions in matters of digital inclusion.

The literature review was carried out based on multiple sources: websites of the players, calls for contributions, companies’ annual reports, or even specialized press articles and academic publications. In total, 14 documents were delivered and 10 restitutions were performed.