Sec John Kerry Remarks at the Global Connect Initiative Event

I’m very grateful, very pleased to see so many ministers of finance, presidents of multilateral development banks, and NGO, others here, because your presence really underscores a fundamental truth, and it’s pretty simple: The Internet is essential to economy prosperity in the 21st century. As President Barack Obama said in 2015, the Internet is not a luxury; it’s a necessity. So when we talk about infrastructure today, we have to include the Internet, right alongside roads and ports and bridges and dams and airports and power grid. And that’s why I want this morning to urge every single one of you who are making decisions about investment and making budget decisions and making decisions about allocation of capital, please think deeply about the long-term contributions that increased connectivity produces. This is really mostly common sense – not even a revelation – but it, nevertheless, takes effort to create a critical mass and to move people. To turn an enormous tanker around, as we know, it takes a while. According to a report that was released by the World Bank, for every 10 percent increase in broadband access, a developing country can see up to 2 percent increase in GDP.

Now, none of this is headline news. But here’s the fact: We are not – we are still not taking full advantage of the – of all of the advantages that connectivity – all the opportunities that connectivity affords. And I want to say to you – and we’re not doing it by a long shot. That’s the irony. Out of every five people in the world, there remain three without internet access in 2016. It’s unacceptable. And in the poorest countries the figure can top 95 percent. With that reality in mind, in 2015, the State Department launched the Global Connect Initiative precisely to bring at least an additional 1.5 billion people online by 2020. And this initiative has three interrelated goals: One, to encourage finance ministers to make Internet access central to all development and growth initiatives. Two, to work in cooperation with multilateral development institutions in order to double public and private lending for connectivity and digital technologies. And three, to harness the knowledge, skills, and resources of the tech community itself to implement solutions for high-speed, affordable broadband access.