Advancing digital equality for children
Project | Addressing the inequalities in children’s lives that lead to disparate experiences in seizing digital opportunities and avoiding digital risks
In a short 30 years, the number of people online has grown from just a few million to many billions – or two-thirds of the world’s population. Digital inclusion approaches have also evolved: from bridging the digital divide between those who could access the internet and those who could not, to a more inclusive approach acknowledging the need for digital literacy and relevant content. The changes have shown results: some 71 per cent of all 15- to 24-year-olds use the internet, making them today’s most connected age group. Yet significant disparities in accessing and using the internet among children remain.
We now know that even with the same internet access, digital literacy and content, children from different places and backgrounds can still have unequal experiences and outcomes. A child’s individual environment and status – including their socioeconomic status, gender identity, culture and well-being – influences the extent to which they can seize digital opportunities and avoid digital risks.
Even with the same internet access, digital literacy and content, children from different places and backgrounds can still have unequal experiences and outcomes
At the heart of the drive for greater digital inclusion is the need to address inequalities in children’s lives. A holistic perspective of digital equality for every child is needed. It must be grounded in the present and be forward looking, given the potential impact of rapidly emerging technologies on children. Recognizing the importance of policies to guide digitization, we at UNICEF, working with the London School of Economics and Political Science, set out to develop a digital equality framework to guide policy development and then used it to review existing policies to see how they could be improved.
Towards a child-centred digital equality framework
The framework UNICEF developed stipulates the elements needed to increase digital equality for children, ranging from addressing inequalities in infrastructure, access to devices and meaningful connectivity, skills, attitudes and social norms, and the relevance of available content, to considering the outcomes of digitization for children’s development and fulfilment of their rights. It calls for a broader range of stakeholders to be involved: global digital standards bodies, national policymakers, large digital companies, community centres, parents and children, recognising that solutions to inequalities in digital societies are not always digital. The framework can be used by government policymakers, international organizations and the private sector to draft policies and interventions. It can also be used to as a rubric to review digital inclusion policies.
As the digital landscape is dynamic, frameworks such as these are intended to be living and adaptable resources that can be updated according to shifting technologies and social and economic realities.
A global review of selected digital inclusion policies
In partnership with the London School of Economics and Political Science, we used the framework to examine 126 selected digital inclusion policies from five regions and 17 countries and assessed to what extent they referred to children and inequalities in their lives. Most digital inclusion policies don't mention children explicitly (except in the context of education), do not sufficiently address their inequalities and are not ready for the future as they do not pay enough attention to the potential positive and negative impacts of some frontier technologies on children. But the analysis also revealed many promising – and sometimes unique – practices that can inspire future policies.
These findings helped us identify gaps and develop requirements for more child-centered, holistic and forward-looking policies. The digital landscape is dynamic; since our review generative AI systems like ChatGPT have taken the world by storm. They especially highlight the requirement for policies to be anticipatory of emerging tech and how they affect existing inequalities – bringing the potential to enrich learning, for example, or deepen digital divides. Further, as disruptive tech affects all aspects of society the requirements for policies to be based on co-ordination across governments and public sector silos – which we are glimpsing in the discussions around AI governance – and true multistakeholder engagement are more important than ever.
We also offer recommendations aimed at key global, regional, national and local stakeholders, including those in the child’s neighborhood, school and home.