Convergencia Research, Consultoría especializada en Latinoamérica y Caribe
Thursday, August 10, 2017

ECLAC already thinks about Digital Agenda 2020

The next Ministerial Conference will analyze in 2018 the articulation of digital policies and cybersecurity. Broadband affordability in the region is among the pending issues.

This week, the preparatory meeting for the Sixth Ministerial Conference on the Information Society in Latin America and the Caribbean convened by ECLAC was held in Santiago, Chile, to evaluate the agreements established within the framework of the Digital Agenda for the region eLAC 2018. The next ministerial meeting will be held in Colombia next year and will focus on the discussion of the new regional digital agenda eLAC 2020.

eLAC was consolidated as a regional agenda for the definition of national strategies and as a space for the exchange of good practices and cooperation. In this context, the next ministerial conference will discuss plans to bridge the digital divide related to infrastructure, innovation based on large data, production digitalization, training in digital skills and the articulation of digital policies and cybersecurity.

According to data from ECLAC's Observatorio Regional de Banda Ancha (ORBA) (Regional Broadband Observatory), Latin America and the Caribbean has made steady progress in terms of access: today more than half of all Latin Americans and Caribbean use the Internet (seven years ago this number reached just one-third) and mobile broadband access has almost doubled in the region, although still far below the levels observed in developed countries.

ECLAC measures the affordability of broadband by the average price offered of 1 Mbps as a percentage of monthly GDP per capita. This indicator is an approximation to the proportion of income that must be allocated to access the service; the lower the proportion, the more affordable the service. According to ECLAC, while in 2010 it was necessary to allocate 17.8% of the income in the region to access the service, in 2016 only 2.1% should be allocated. The biggest advance was made in the Plurinational State of Bolivia, where it went from 84.8% to 9%. Paraguay, Ecuador and Colombia also showed significant progress with average decreases of 16 percentage points.

In addition to having on average a smaller percentage of households with Internet, the region is also characterized by high heterogeneity among its countries. Of the 24 countries analyzed by ECLAC, three countries - Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay - were close to 60%. The difference among the countries with the highest and the lowest percentage of households connected to the Internet in the countries of Central and South America was 46.2 percentage points in 2015, while in the OECD countries it was 30.7 percentage points.

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