2020 Affordability Report

The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the scale and consequences of the digital divide and underlined the urgent need to find solutions to digital inequality. Governments are being forced to reassess priorities and step up with innovative solutions to address a range of challenges across health, employment, education, and economic resiliency. As the internet and digital technology will play an increasingly important role in our world, governments must develop policies to deliver affordable and meaningful connectivity to all. The 2020 Affordability Report looks at the state of policy progress to bring down the cost of internet access and points to the importance of effective national broadband plans (NBPs) in providing the conditions for internet prices to decline. Data on policy and prices is trending in the right direction. In the past five years, mobile broadband has become more affordable, and Affordability Drivers Index (ADI) scores have risen in most countries across all three regions we study — Africa, Latin America and Caribbean, and the Asia-Pacific region — signalling improvement in broadband policies.

• Broadband policies continue to improve. The average ADI score across the countries we study has risen by 13.6 points, from 42 to 55.6 since 2014, with improvements most notable in low-income countries.
• Africa sees the biggest policy advances. While Africa remains the region with the lowest average ADI score, this year it saw the fastest improvement (6.7% since 2019), with countries improving planning, better spectrum management and supporting programmes to narrow the digital gender gap.
• Mobile broadband prices have fallen consistently among countries within the Affordability Drivers Index, with the average cost of 1GB data declining by more than half since 2015, from 7.0% to 3.1% of average monthly income.