The World Bank Group’s first digital strategy aims to expand affordable digital access, improve services, create jobs, and build AI foundations, addressing connectivity, affordability, skills, and infrastructure in developing countries.
Key Points
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The World Bank Group launched its first digital strategy to help developing countries improve affordable digital access, services, and job creation. It prioritizes expanding connectivity, affordable devices and data, strengthening digital services and skills, and building AI foundations, focusing on task-specific “small AI” applications.
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This initiative addresses the global digital divide, with over 2 billion people offline in 2025 and low internet use in low-income countries. An AI Infrastructure and Readiness Initiative was also announced to provide affordable computing capacity, targeting Africa and Latin America initially.
- The strategy supports job creation in sectors like infrastructure, agribusiness, health care, tourism, and manufacturing by enhancing digital tools, productivity, and finance access while overcoming barriers to digital inclusion and economic growth.
The World Bank Group has introduced its inaugural digital strategy aimed at bridging the digital divide in developing countries by expanding affordable digital access, enhancing service delivery, and fostering job creation. This comprehensive strategy emphasizes four core priorities: expanding connectivity infrastructure, reducing the cost of devices and data, strengthening digital services and skill development, and establishing robust foundations that enable countries to harness the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly focusing on task-specific or “small AI” applications that address practical, localized challenges.
The initiative emerges in response to stark global digital disparities, highlighted by the fact that over 2 billion people remained offline as of 2025, with internet penetration especially low in low-income nations. To tackle these gaps, alongside the digital strategy, the World Bank Group unveiled an AI Infrastructure and Readiness Initiative designed to provide emerging markets—initially targeting Africa and Latin America—with affordable, shared computing resources. This effort is intended to democratize access to advanced AI capabilities and accelerate digital inclusion.
Recognizing the multidimensional challenges faced by developing countries, including constrained resources and an impending demographic surge, the strategy is timely and critical. Over the next decade to decade and a half, approximately 1.2 billion young people in these regions will enter the workforce, yet economic projections forecast the creation of only about 420 million jobs. Digital technologies, as articulated by World Bank Group President Ajay Banga, hold transformative potential to enhance job creation and optimize limited resources through an integrated approach encompassing connectivity, affordable devices, digital literacy, and relevant digital services.
Crucially, digital innovation can catalyze growth and productivity across the World Bank Group’s identified priority sectors—namely infrastructure and energy, agribusiness, health care, tourism, and value-added manufacturing. By enabling businesses to better reach customers, improve operational efficiency, and access financial services, while simultaneously reducing public service delivery costs, digital tools offer a vital pathway to sustainable economic development in these regions. Nonetheless, addressing persisting barriers such as affordability, infrastructure deficits, and digital literacy remains essential to fully realize these benefits and close the global digital divide.
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