A whopping 62.1 percent of the world's population is still not online. That is, they did not access the Internet at least once in 2014. The data comes from the 2014 Global Connectivity Report produced by the Facebook-owned Internet.org.
The report found that in developed countries 76.2 percent use the Internet whilst the figure for developing nations is just 29.8 percent. North America is the most connected region of the world where 84.4 percent of people are online whereas South Asia is the least connected at 13.7%, below even sub-saharan Africa at 16.9%. Europe is curiously paired with Central Asia which combined population is 65.4% connected.
Interestingly, South Asia includes Pakistan and India, which produces more computer engineers than any other nation on earth. This is despite a finding from the report showing that India is one of the cheapest places to access the web and 94% of Indians can afford at least a 100MB per month connection.
Another surprise is that the rate of Internet growth has actually slowed from 14.7 percent in 2010 to just 6.6 percent in 2014. Facebook launched Internet.org in 2013 to highlight the need to get the developing world online as it started to run out of potential new customers in first world countries and the organisation is hoping to reverse this decline.
Internet.org highlights three areas that can be improved in order to promote the spread of internet access: infrastructure, affordability and relevance. According to the report, only 53 percent of people have sufficient relevant information online. Though 91 percent live within range of a mobile network and 79 percent can afford a 100Mb per month internet access, those figures drop to 48.7 percent and 54.9 percent when the bar is raised to 3G network access and 250MB per month.
There is also a digital divide across gender where nearly 25 percent fewer women than men have access to the Internet. This gap widens in poorer regions to 45 percent in-sub saharan Africa whereas in high income countries the gap is negligible.
The report compares the Internet age to the Industrial Revolution or the invention of the telegraph and claims the Web should be accessible to all. "The internet isn't a guarantor of economic progress", it reads, "but it is an enabler". Internet.org says that if industry, governments and NGOs don't work together to improve global Internet connectivity that it may remain permanently out of reach for billions of people.
Clearly, the way forward for this is mobile connectivity as it is by far the cheapest and quickest way to get people online. Mobile connectivity didn't exist in 2005 and it now accounts for more than two thirds of all Internet connections.
The statistics in the report are collected from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a UN agency for information and communications technology, The World Bank and a recent report by Intel & Dalberg on Internet gender inequality.
You can access the full 2014 Global Connectivity Report here and a summary from Facebook here.
Photo: Frankie Leon | Flickr
