Digital inclusion key towards achieving SDGs says Huawei Vice President

Dar es Salam.  The government, business leaders and civil society need to work together towards digital inclusion as it's highly relevant to attaining some of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) such as health, education and gender equality.

Huawei Vice President, Southern African Region Mr David Chen said recently on the sidelines of  Southern Africa Development Community (Sadc) ICT ministerial  meeting held  in Dar es Salam.

“The government needs to leverage policy levers to guide more high-quality resources to ICT infrastructure and digital skills, and use policies to reduce ICT deployment cost which will finally lead to rise in digital service affordability," he said.

Mr Chen said a strong relationship exists between ICT maturity and the level of progress on the SDGs, especially in SDG3, 4, 5, 9 in quality education,  good health and well-being, gender equality and Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure.

“Digital inclusion requires triangular cooperation between the public and private sector as well as civil society," he said

According to the World Bank statistics 53 per cent of the world’s populations still do not use the internet and worse still, four-fifths of the unconnected populations are located in Asia-Pacific and Africa.

Africa exhibits the greatest connectivity shortfall when examining the proportion of population that is unconnected. On average, 76 per cent of the African population do not have access to the Internet, with many of those unconnected living in rural areas.

Mr Chen added, Huawei announced its digital inclusion initiative TECH4ALL this month at Huawei connect 2019 in Shanghai, with the target of helping another 500 million people benefit from digital technology in the next five years.

At the conference Huawei called on more individuals and organizations to join Huawei in addressing global issues related to healthcare, education, development, and the environment.

As the latest effort driving this digital inclusion initiative TECH4ALL, Huawei recently unveiled the DigiTruck project in Africa, in partnership with Belgium nonprofit organization Close the Gap, to provide digital skills training to rural and remote communities in Kenya.

“We do not view connectivity as a privilege, but as a necessity. We believe that the impact of ICT should be measured by how many people can benefit from it.” David Chen said.