Despite substantial digital investment and stakeholder initiatives, billions in the Global South remain excluded from digital participation. This systematic literature review synthesizes 122 empirical studies published between 2003 and 2024 in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania to analyze key stakeholders, their challenges, and the strategies employed to foster sustainable digital inclusion. Drawing on stakeholder theory and digital ecosystems theory, the study identifies ecosystem fragmentation as a central bottleneck. We advance stakeholder theory by introducing the concept of Ecosystem Coordination Stakeholders (ECS), a role-based stakeholder group whose salience derives from coordination capability alongside power, legitimacy, and urgency. The findings highlight the need for policy frameworks that develop and strengthen institutional capacity for coordination, extend ecosystems theory by recognizing coordination as an architectural developmental need, and highlight the importance of design strategies responsive to specific fragmentation patterns in diverse regional contexts. Our study also reveals that work remains concentrated in Asia and Africa, with continued Global North–Global South inequities in authorship and journal visibility. This study offers management and policy insights on digital poverty that may also apply to other complex challenges requiring effective and sustained multi-stakeholder collaboration.

Despite growing attention being paid to digital inclusion and its impact on individual well-being, empirical research focusing specifically on middle-aged adults and young-old adults remains limited, particularly in China. This study examines the association between digital inclusion and subjective well-being among middle-aged adults (aged 45–59) and young-old adults (aged 60–69) in China, utilizing data from the 2019 and 2021 waves of Chinese Social Survey (CSS). The analysis begins with descriptive statistics that outline the current status of digital inclusion and subjective well-being among these groups, followed by regression models that assess the impact of digital inclusion and investigate possible moderating factors. The results indicate that digital inclusion significantly enhances subjective well-being for both middle-aged and young-old adults, with all four dimensions of digital inclusion showing positive associations with well-being. Among these, digital learning inclusion exerts the strongest effect. However, factors such as socio-economic status, social connection and political participation do not fully account for this relationship, and, notably, social connection may even diminish the positive effects of digital inclusion on well-being. This study offers a new perspective on the impact of digital inclusion on the subjective well-being of middle-aged and young-old adults, and provides a direction for further research in this field.

National digital ID apps are increasingly gaining popularity globally. As how we transact in the world is increasingly mediated by the digital, questions need to be asked about how these apps support the inclusion of disabled people. In particular, international instruments, such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, spotlight the need for inclusive information and communication technologies. In this paper, we adopt a critical disability studies lens to analyse the workings of state-designed digital IDs—Singpass app—and what they can tell us about existing ways of designing for digital inclusion. We situate the case of the Singpass app within the rise of global digital transactions and the political-technical infrastructures that shape their accessibility. We analyse the ways Singpass centres disability, the problems it may still entail, and the possible implications for inclusion. At the same time, we uncover the lessons Singpass’s development holds for questions of global digital inclusion.

The deployment of digital technologies in African cities, beyond improving service delivery, raises issues of digital inclusion, digital rights, and increasing spatial and social inequalities. As part of the African Cities Lab Summit 2023, we conducted a workshop with 20 multidisciplinary participants to explore issues related to the deployment of digital technologies in African cities. This research is a policy paper that addresses these issues and provides policy recommendations for local governments. It emphasizes the importance of inclusive digital infrastructure, regulations safeguarding vulnerable sectors, and governance ensuring citizens’ rights in the digital transformation. Focusing on transparency, equity, and collaboration with communities, local governments play a vital role in fostering inclusive digital transformation, essential for equitable and rights-centric smart cities in Africa.

Cet article s’intéresse aux inégalités numériques qui touchent l’accès aux services publics, et plus précisément à la justice. Au Québec, les plumitifs sont des registres publics qui retracent l’historique judiciaire des justiciables, et ils sont disponibles en ligne. Dans une perspective d’accès à la justice, cet article aborde la tension existante entre les objectifs de la numérisation des services publics et les inégalités d’accès au numérique, en s’intéressant au cas des plumitifs au Québec. Nous retraçons l’évolution des approches en termes d’inégalités numériques en insistant sur la nécessité de dépasser la question de l’accès matériel aux services numériques pour nous intéresser aussi aux inégalités socio-économiques préexistantes. Nous analysons les difficultés d’accès aux plumitifs et l’usage qui en sont fait à la lumière des différentes dimensions de l’accès numérique selon Jan van Dijk (2006) afin d’envisager des pistes de solutions concrètes et efficaces pour améliorer l’accès aux plumitifs et plus largement à la justice.

Older people have increasingly been using the new information and communication technologies (ICTs), namely the internet. Seeking to contribute with substantive information on their digital inclusion, this paper focuses on the adoption and use of ICTs by older adults, highlighting their experiences and considering their plurality. Taking a qualitative approach, the core goal of the empirical research underlying this paper was to understand what mechanisms and modalities configure the relationship of older internet users with the new ICTs. With that objective in mind, interviews were conducted with 20 internet users over the age of 60. Those interviews, which included a biographical element, were subjected to multi-categorical analysis. Results suggest a typology of modes of relating to the new ICTs among older internet users that reflects different trajectories, practices, skills, significances and impacts. The analysis shows how life trajectories and differentiated uses are reflected in equally differentiated impacts for older adults, contributing to their quality of life in different ways and to different degrees. Digital skills play a fundamental role in enhancing or limiting those effects. The results of this research help break down the stereotypes associated with the older generations and may have relevant implications for the design of digital inclusion policies and initiatives.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an increased need to conduct research and community engagement using digital methods. Unfortunately, the shift away from in-person research activities can make it difficult to engage and recruit participants from under-resourced communities that lack adequate digital infrastructure. At the beginning of the pandemic, our team recognized that imminent lockdowns would significantly disrupt ongoing engagement with low-income housing resident community partners and that we would ultimately bear responsibility if that occurred. This manuscript outlines the development of methods designed to create capacity for virtual engagement with a community advisory board that were subsequently applied to a longitudinal mixed-methods study. We describe how our experience engaging low-income housing residents during the height of the pandemic influenced the approach and offer guidelines useful for engaging under-resourced communities regardless of setting. Of these, a strong commitment to providing technology, unlimited data connectivity, and basic digital literacy training/technical support is most important. While each of these is essential and failure in any one area will reduce overall effectiveness of the effort, providing adequate technical support while maintaining ongoing relationships with community members is the most important and resource-intensive.

In many parts of the world, older adults continue to face significant barriers to digital inclusion, but the source of that inequality is not well understood. However, we do not know enough about differences among older people seeking to improve their digital skills. Examining the impact of a national three-year digital inclusion programme reaching more than 580,000 older adults in Australia, this study explores factors that affect digital skills and literacy later in life. A mixed-methods approach involving a two time-point survey (N = 337) along with participant interviews (N = 30) examined the effectiveness of programme elements. A latent class analysis was applied to examine differences in the way older adults engage with digital technologies. Qualitative analysis helped to detail those differences. Programme outcomes were far from uniform, reflecting diverse motivations, lifecourse experiences, needs and capabilities among older adults, countering much existing research that tends to elide those differences. With reference to the concept of situated literacies, we highlight the importance of life experiences, needs and motivations to the outcomes of digital inclusion interventions. Our findings emphasise the need to disaggregate older adult internet users, and account for differences in life experiences, needs and motivations in the design and delivery of digital inclusion interventions at scale.