Approximately 67 per cent of the world’s population, or 5.4 billion people, is now online. This represents a growth of 4.7 per cent since 2022, an increase from the 3.5 per cent recorded from 2021 to 2022. The number of people offline in 2023 decreased to an estimated 2.6 billion people, representing 33 per cent of the global population.
Internet use remains tightly linked to the level of a country’s development. In 2020, nine out of ten people in high-income countries used the Internet.[1] In 2023, the share edged up to 93 per cent, getting closer to universality.
In low-income countries, 27 per cent of the population uses the Internet, up from 24 per cent in 2022. This 66 percentage point gap reflects the width of the digital divide between high-income and low-income countries and regions.
In low-income countries, the number of Internet users has grown by 44.1 per cent since 2020, and by 14.3 per in the past year alone. This is encouraging but it is being measured from a very low initial number of users. By comparison, the number of Internet users in high-income countries has increased by just 1.1 per cent during the same period, although this is to be expected considering that 93 out of every 100 people in this group of countries are already online. It is unlikely that this number will ever reach 100, as some people will never want to connect.
In Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the Americas, between 87 and 91 per cent of the population uses the Internet, which is approaching universal use (defined for practical purposes as an Internet penetration rate of at least 95 per cent). Approximately two-thirds of the population in the Arab States and Asia-Pacific regions (69 and 66 per cent, respectively) use the Internet, in line with the global average, while the average for Africa is just 37 per cent of the population.
Universal connectivity also remains a distant prospect in least developed countries (LDCs) and landlocked developing countries (LLDCs), where only 35 and 39 per cent of the population are online, respectively.
[1] In this publication, regions correspond to the ITU regions, whose composition is available at http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/definitions/regions.aspx. The composition of least developed countries (LDCs), landlocked developing countries (LLDCs), and small island developing States (SIDS) is available at https://www.un.org/ohrlls/. Income groups are according to the World Bank classification: https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519 .