Bridging Divides: ICTs as Catalysts for Inclusive Development

When a farmer in rural Kenya receives a crop disease alert on her mobile phone before the blight spreads, or when a citizen in Brazil casts a digital vote on how the local government should spend its budget, something significant is happening. Information and Communication Technologies – commonly referred to as ICTs – are no longer just tools for convenience. They are actively reshaping how development happens, who gets to participate in it, and whose voices are heard. From mobile broadband networks in sub-Saharan Africa to e-governance platforms in South Asia, ICTs are being deployed to break down barriers that have long kept marginalized communities out of the development conversation. But this transformation is neither automatic nor uniform. It demands a clear-eyed understanding of both the promise and the persistent challenges that come with it.

ICTs as drivers of development communication
Democratizing information access
Enhancing citizen engagement and participation
The digital divide: ICTs’ most persistent challenge
Addressing the divide: what inclusive ICT strategy looks like
The limits of ICT optimism: critical perspectives
ICTs reshaping communication strategies for development

ICTs as drivers of development communication

Development communication is, at its core, about ensuring that information flows in ways that empower people to improve their lives and participate in the decisions that affect them. ICTs have dramatically expanded what is possible in this space. According to the OECD, ICTs are crucial to reducing poverty, improving access to health and education services, and creating new income opportunities – and in particular, mobile phones have opened up new channels for the free flow of ideas and opinions, thereby promoting democracy and human rights.

The scale of this change is hard to overstate. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs reports that internet penetration grew from just over 6 percent of the world’s population in 2000 to 43 percent by 2015, with more than 7 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide during the same period. Mobile broadband in particular overcame major infrastructure barriers, with its penetration rate increasing fourfold between 2010 and 2015. This rapid expansion has given development communicators an entirely new toolkit – one that allows for real-time information sharing, community-level engagement, and participatory feedback at a scale that was unimaginable in the era of top-down, one-way mass communication.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) affirms that ICTs can now accelerate progress across all 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), delivering results “at a scale, speed, quality, accuracy and cost not imaginable just a decade ago” in areas including healthcare, education, finance, governance, and agriculture.

Democratizing information access

One of the most significant contributions of ICTs to development is their potential to democratize who has access to information. Historically, development communication was dominated by a flow from institutions downward to communities. ICTs disrupt this hierarchy. A smallholder farmer can now access weather data, market prices, and agricultural advisories on a basic smartphone. A patient in a remote district can connect with a health worker through a telemedicine platform. A first-generation student can access quality educational content online.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development explicitly recognizes that the spread of ICTs and global interconnectedness has great potential to accelerate human progress, bridge the digital divide, and develop knowledge societies. The agenda calls on governments, the private sector, civil society, and international organizations to integrate ICTs into their development strategies across goals including quality education (SDG 4), gender equality (SDG 5), and inclusive infrastructure (SDG 9).

Mobile technology has been especially transformative in contexts where fixed internet infrastructure is limited. UNCTAD’s SDG Pulse data shows that as of 2023, approximately 96 percent of the world’s population is covered by mobile broadband networks – yet coverage does not automatically translate into meaningful use, because digital skills, affordability, and local-language content remain critical gaps.

Enhancing citizen engagement and participation

ICTs are not just about delivering information – they are also reshaping how citizens engage with governance and development processes. E-participation, or the use of digital tools to involve citizens in policy-making and public decision-making, has become a growing area of practice worldwide.

A systematic review published in the journal Social Sciences (MDPI, 2025), drawing on 46 peer-reviewed studies, found that ICT tools including social media, e-government platforms, and e-participation systems have significantly improved the quality, efficiency, and transparency of democratic engagement. Social media platforms have emerged as key drivers of political activism, especially among young people, enabling real-time discussions, grassroots mobilization, and open communication between citizens and their representatives.

At the parliamentary level, AGORA – the parliamentary resource center of the United Nations – documents a range of ICT-driven citizen engagement initiatives across the globe. In Uganda, the UsPeak project allows citizens to share views with parliamentarians via text message, voicemail, or a call center, with responses aggregated by issue so that MPs can track constituent concerns. In South Korea – ranked at the top of the UN E-Government Development Index – MPs use dedicated apps that allow citizens to submit opinions on live legislative bills. In Bhutan, where mountainous terrain makes physical constituency visits nearly impossible, virtual parliament platforms are being built on top of existing community internet infrastructure.

In India, the MyGov platform exemplifies how ICTs can enable proactive citizen engagement, crowdsourcing ideas and enabling citizens to contribute directly to governance through digital means. These examples illustrate a broader shift: ICTs are enabling development communication to move from informing communities to genuinely involving them.

The digital divide: ICTs’ most persistent challenge

Despite this potential, a critical problem remains. The digital divide – the gap between those who can access and meaningfully use ICTs and those who cannot – threatens to turn a tool of inclusion into yet another axis of inequality.

As defined by the OECD, the digital divide refers to disparities between individuals, households, and geographic areas at different socio-economic levels in their opportunities to access ICTs and use the internet. It is not simply a binary problem of “haves and have-nots.” Experts emphasize that beyond physical access, the divide also encompasses digital literacy, the affordability of devices and data, and the availability of content that is relevant to local communities.

The Interaction Design Foundation notes that as of 2023, 2.6 billion people remained offline, down from 2.9 billion in 2021. The UN’s Roundtable on Digital Inclusion has stated that “meaningful access is vital for social, political, and economic empowerment,” and that narrowing digital divides must go beyond simply reaching basic internet connectivity. This is a vital corrective for development communicators: access without usability, literacy, and relevant content is not truly inclusion.

The divide is not uniform. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance identifies that it disproportionately affects communities of color, Indigenous peoples, low-income households, people with disabilities, rural populations, and older adults. In development contexts, this frequently maps onto the very communities that development communication is meant to reach – which is why the design of ICT-based initiatives must actively address these structural barriers rather than assume connectivity equals participation.

Addressing the divide: what inclusive ICT strategy looks like

Bridging the digital divide is not a single policy fix. It requires action across multiple fronts simultaneously. According to the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, meaningful digital inclusion requires five elements: affordable and robust broadband internet service; internet-enabled devices that meet users’ needs; access to digital literacy training; quality technical support; and the design of applications and content that actively enable participation and self-sufficiency.

UN-Habitat’s framework for smart cities stresses that accessible digital infrastructure has become an essential standard of living, comparable to water, energy, and housing. The UN Secretary-General has called for all of the world’s people to be connected by 2030, making global connectivity, digital inclusion, and digital human rights core pillars of the broader development agenda.

The ITU’s Connect 2030 Agenda sets out a shared vision for ICT development structured around five goals: growth in access and use, inclusiveness through universal broadband, sustainability in managing risks from rapid ICT expansion, innovation in support of digital transformation, and strengthened partnerships across the ICT ecosystem. On gender specifically, the EQUALS Global Partnership – a coalition involving ITU, UN Women, GSMA, the International Trade Centre, and UN University – works to close the gender digital gap by ensuring women and girls have equal access to digital technologies and the skills to become creators and leaders in the ICT space, not merely passive consumers.

For countries where internet penetration remains low, AGORA’s research on parliamentary ICT use points to a pragmatic path forward: hybrid models that layer mobile phone-based engagement (SMS, voice messages, toll-free call centers) on top of internet-based platforms. This approach allows development communicators to reach populations without smartphones or reliable data connections, while still building toward digital participation over time.

The limits of ICT optimism: critical perspectives

It would be a mistake to treat ICTs as a silver bullet for development communication challenges. There is a growing body of evidence that technology alone does not produce meaningful participation – and can, under certain conditions, actually entrench exclusion.

Research published in The Extractive Industries and Society (ScienceDirect) on Tanzania’s governance of natural resources illustrates this tension sharply. While the Tanzanian government has increasingly used ICT platforms to inform citizens about extractive sector developments, the same government has also taken political and legal measures to ensure that meaningful citizen engagement does not evolve from information access. ICT, in other words, can be used to simulate transparency while blocking genuine participation.

The MDPI systematic review similarly warns that ICTs bring with them serious challenges: cybersecurity risks, the spread of misinformation, surveillance concerns, and the ethical problems of algorithmic manipulation. The digital divide itself can deepen participatory inequality – as research published by Springer Nature notes, more resourced citizen groups are better positioned to exploit new digital participation opportunities, potentially deepening what scholars call the “participatory divide” rather than closing it.

These critiques do not negate the transformative potential of ICTs in development communication. They do, however, reinforce a central principle: technology is not neutral. Whether ICTs serve inclusion or exclusion depends on the policy frameworks that govern them, the design choices that shape them, and the genuine political will to allow marginalized communities not just to receive information, but to act on it.

ICTs reshaping communication strategies for development

What does all this mean for how development communication is practiced? At the most basic level, it requires moving away from broadcast models – where institutions produce and push content to passive audiences – and toward participatory, two-way communication ecosystems. ICTs make this possible in ways that were previously impractical at scale.

Research by the Just Governance Group identifies several enabling conditions for effective ICT-based citizen participation in development: widespread mobile and internet access at affordable cost, a regulatory framework that promotes free access to information, and critically, a design philosophy that is problem-driven rather than tool-driven. Digital technologies should be built around solving users’ real governance concerns – not deployed because the technology itself is novel or available.

The same research highlights a common failure mode: citizens are found not to use digital participation platforms when they are unaware they exist, when they lack the digital literacy to navigate them, or when they do not trust the security of the platform. For development communicators, this underscores that technology rollout must be accompanied by robust community outreach, capacity building, and demonstrated responsiveness from governments and institutions. When citizens report concerns and nothing changes, engagement drops – as the case of Brazil’s digital participatory budgeting platform in Belo Horizonte demonstrated, where participation declined in subsequent rounds after initial enthusiasm.

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) articulated the goal clearly: building a people-centred, inclusive, and development-oriented information society where everyone can create, access, utilize, and share information and knowledge. Achieving this requires treating ICT access not as a technical problem but as a social and political one – embedded in questions of equity, power, language, infrastructure, and governance that development communicators are uniquely positioned to address.

What do you think? As mobile connectivity continues to expand across the Global South, do you believe governments are genuinely using ICTs to empower citizens – or primarily to manage and monitor them? And can development communication strategies truly be inclusive if large segments of a population still lack reliable internet access or the digital literacy to participate meaningfully?

References

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Table of Contents

ICTs as drivers of development communication 🔗

Democratizing information access 🔗

Enhancing citizen engagement and participation 🔗

The digital divide: ICTs’ most persistent challenge 🔗

Addressing the divide: what inclusive ICT strategy looks like 🔗

The limits of ICT optimism: critical perspectives 🔗

ICTs reshaping communication strategies for development 🔗