Policy Brief No. 208 — September 2025
Digital Inclusion: Policy Pathways for Public-Private Partnerships Deepak Maheshwari Key Points → The digital divide persists, especially along gender, geographic and generational lines. → The public sector often lacks the requisite resources to ensure universal and meaningful connectivity. Meanwhile, the private sector may ignore financially unviable people and places. → By combining the convening power of the public sector with private sector entrepreneurship, well-designed and executed public-private partnerships (PPPs) may bridge such gaps. → While charting pathways for PPPs in pursuit of digital inclusion, policy makers must focus on: – identifying and monitoring digital exclusion; – ensuring transparency and accountability; – upholding technology neutrality and adopting digital public infrastructure (DPI); – engaging with the local communities for codeveloping applications and capacity building; – creating intentional positive discrimination for demand-side support; and – overcoming the friction in interagency coordination.
Introduction From education to entertainment, health care to hospitality, communication to commerce, and trade to tourism, everything is increasingly dependent on the digital ecosystem — an integrated domain where telecommunications, information technology and broadcasting increasingly converge— enabled and sustained by the foundational infrastructure of the internet. Unsurprisingly, then, digital exclusion could be a symptom or result of, or even a reason for, broader exclusion, seen in limited opportunities for education, health care, skilling, financing and earning livelihoods, as well as difficulty, delay or even denial in relation to benefits and public services (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE] 2023). While public sector efforts in the form of policy proclamations at the international level, such as the Global Digital Compact, adopted by consensus at the UN Summit for the Future (United Nations 2024), and at the national and subnational levels are necessary, these proclamations alone have been insufficient in bridging the digital divide. Meanwhile, private actors, left to their own devices, may ignore or deprioritize customers, communities or regions deemed commercially unviable, leaving them digitally excluded. This logjam must be broken to realize the public interest of digital inclusion envisioned in policy proclamations by leveraging the resources, innovation and expertise of the private sector through PPPs. However, these PPPs can