This event is dedicated to the international digital community, aiming to share practical experiences from the ground on leveraging existing infrastructure to connect the unconnected and the hardest-to-reach populations. The extensive physical network of community anchor institutions, which enjoy the reach and the trust of local populations, including community centers, post offices, schools, libraries, or other public spaces. These have proved to be well placed to provide digital support and digital services to unconnected communities and less digitally savvy individuals, including those living in rural and remote areas.

The discussion will provide concrete examples of how embedding existing community anchor institutions into digital transformation strategies, and enabling them to facilitate digital literacy training or provide access to services such as e-commerce, e-government, e-learning or digital financial services can be a cost-effective way to expand the benefits of the digital economy to areas where usually no other service providers are present.

The event will also seek to foster discussions on the way forward – how to advance from lessons learned toward meaningful and sustainable digital inclusion.

We welcome and highly encourage participation from your library community to add on to this conversation and to envision possible collaborations for a more inclusive digital future.