In June 2005, the Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union launched the Connect the World initiative with founding partners to help bring access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) to the estimated one billion people worldwide for whom making a simple telephone call remains out of reach.

Connect the World is a global multi-stakeholder platform established within the context of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) to promote existing projects and encourage new partnerships to bridge the digital divide. By showcasing development efforts now underway and by tracking progress and identifying areas where needs are the most pressing, Connect the World will help create a critical mass that will generate the momentum needed to "connect the unconnected by 2015."

At present, ITU estimates that around 800’000 villages — or 30% of all villages worldwide — are still without any kind of connection. It would take an estimated 1 billion USD to connect each village through a shared community access point such as a school, hospital or post office. From there, villages could expand access through various local solutions.

The Connect the World concept comprises three key building blocks — "Enabling Environment," "Infrastructure and Readiness," and "Applications and Services" — which together constitute the primary areas ITU believes need to be addressed in developing effective measures to stimulate ICT development.

By leading the way with projects to connect the unconnected, and by providing an international platform to showcase the many successful development initiatives being undertaken by other entities worldwide, ITU hopes Connect the World will spur organizations at every level to get more actively involved in ICT development.

The Tunis Agenda for the Information Society recognized the Connect the World initiative as an example of how to strengthen cooperation among stakeholders to ensure the effective implementation of the Geneva and Tunis outcomes. In this sense, Connect the World serves as a concrete demonstration of an emerging international model, which gained momentum during the WSIS process: a decentralized multi-stakeholder network of players, working together towards a common goal, supported by a UN specialized agency as facilitator.

To date, Connect the World has served as an effective platform to showcase development initiatives of ITU and its partners. Partners have been drawn to this voluntary platform because it gives them an opportunity to share their experiences with others, meet new potential partners and demonstrate how their initiatives contribute to a larger global effort. They have in turn strengthened ITU by bringing their digital divide initiatives under the Connect the World banner, where ITU plays a facilitating and mobilizing role.

The ultimate objective is to have the Connect the World platform support a global community of partners and a broad popular movement that is greater than the sum of its parts, by leveraging the skills and experience of a diverse range of players to achieve a common goal of empowering of all of the world’s people through information and communication technologies.

To support this objective, greater use will be made of the Connect the World website as a vehicle to engage and mobilize partners and other stakeholders. New on-line tools will be introduced to support collaboration and networking as well as the launching of new partnerships. ITU will also introduce a series of indicators to track progress in meeting shared goals. Furthermore, Connect the World will be levered on an on-going basis as a forum to bring together stakeholders at various events, including WTDC in March and TELECOM World in December 2006. Together, these activities will help maintain momentum and guide collective efforts to connect the unconnected by 2015.

ITU estimates show that some 800 000 villages — representing around 30 per cent of all villages worldwide — are still without connection to any kind of ICT. Even in areas where basic services are available, ITU figures show that the 942 million people living in the world’s developed economies enjoy four times better access to fixed and mobile phone services, eight times better access to Internet services, and own 13 times more PCs than the 85 per cent of the world’s population living in developing countries (see charts).

Progress is evident in this chart, which shows growing access to fixed telephone lines over the past decade or so. The gap has been reduced, but it still remains substantial.

The gap in mobile access has been reduced even more. Despite this progress though, in the rich countries of the world, users still enjoy at least four times better access to both fixed and mobile phone services.

The gap is larger for access to the Internet and personal computers. Internet usage is eight times higher in the developed world than in the developing world, even though this has fallen from a gap of over 72 times.