THE world is experiencing unprecedented and accelerating changes in the environment and at least 70 million people have joined the ranks of extreme poverty due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Because of this, the Government has offered various efforts to encourage business digitalisation, which would open up tremendous opportunities.
However, to ensure its effectiveness, there must be initiatives that would complement those efforts in order to successfully narrow down the digital divide.
“Digitalisation opens up opportunities for lots of people, but if you’re not on the right side of the digital divide or, in other words, if you are unconnected or you do not have the ability or the skills to use your device, you’re going to be left out,” said the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) chief digital officer Robert Opp when moderating the AVEVA Sustainability Media Roundtable session.
Opp also mentioned that UNDP has gone through its own digital transformation and have begun seeing the benefits as well as the potential that digital technologies have in bringing a positive impact to the lives of the people.
“One of the big issues for us that we see, globally, is the need to bridge the digital divide. We can expect that those inequalities that we see currently will rise if we’re not looking at how to intentionally reach out to everybody. Therefore, we must close the digital divide and we must use digital approaches that can include the entire population,” he opined. – Jan 28, 2021
