ITU

Digital Infrastructure Investment: The school connection

The global drive for universal and meaningful connectivity demands substantial financial resources, proactive leadership, technical expertise and inclusive collaboration — particularly to maintain headway through the last-mile delivery of service.

Investment in digital infrastructure has gained unprecedented momentum as a way to boost socio-economic development and accelerate lagging progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out by the United Nations for 2030. Connectivity and digital technologies can directly or indirectly contribute to an estimated 70 per cent of SDG targets.

For many remote and underserved communities around the world, the local school provides a logical hub for free Internet service. This makes school connectivity a key digital infrastructure element for developing countries.

In 2024, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) launched the Digital Infrastructure Investment Initiative (DIII) to address the global connectivity gap. The collaborative initiative brings together development finance institutions and other stakeholders, including a DIII working group of over 40 investors, technology companies, governments and civil society.

ITU has now published a white paper on the main outcomes of the DIII’s initial stage. The paper outlines key challenges along with innovative financing mechanisms and instruments that could offer solutions to the current shortfall in digital infrastructure investment.

In its next phase, the initiative aims to drive investment at unprecedented scale to bring Internet access to the 2.6 billion people still currently offline.

ITU will spotlight digital infrastructure investment needs at the upcoming Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) to be held by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) in Seville, Spain, between 30 June and 3 July.

Synergies with Giga

Both the DIII and FfD4 intersect with Giga, the ITU-UNICEF partnership whose goal is to connect every school in the world to the Internet by 2030. Giga is exploring innovative financing approaches to support school connectivity, and representatives from Giga’s community have provided useful insights to the DIII working group.

Going forward, the DIII will leverage Giga as a platform to advance the outcomes of this work.

Giga’s innovative public-private partnerships and on-the-ground results were recognized at an ITU-hosted side event during an FfD4 preparatory meeting in New York.

A senior advisor at Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the DIII and Giga “very good examples” of public-private collaboration.

Pablo Gutiérrez-Segú, Senior Advisor to the Director General for United Nations, International Organizations and Human Rights, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, told ITU News: “We should continue striving for effective synergies, improve the coordination of all our efforts, and ensure transparency and investment accountability.”

Gutiérrez-Segú and other attendees stressed the need to find ways to both maximize the impact of traditional investments and develop new financing mechanisms and instruments to reach the required levels of digital investment.

Hosting open-source R&D

The Governments of Switzerland and Spain, as well as the Regional Government of Catalonia and the City of Barcelona, are supporters of Giga and host offices for the initiative. Specifically, Spain has helped to establish the Giga Technology Centre in Barcelona, the research and development arm producing Giga’s high-tech school connectivity solutions.

Developers at the Barcelona centre are producing innovative open-source software to help connect schools affordably and sustainably everywhere.

The Giga Maps platform launched in June 2024, for instance, geolocates schools and measures their real-time connectivity status, helping governments make more informed, effective digital infrastructure investment decisions.

Download the DIII white paper: Digital Infrastructure Investment Initiative – Closing the digital infrastructure investment gap by 2030

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