commbox Digital Access, Inequalities & Inclusion

Digital Access, Inequalities & Inclusion

Filter

286

Sort by:

Direction:

Indic Voice Technologies for an Inclusive Digital India: Toolkit for Developers

Nihar Desai, Sujith P., Harleen Kaur, Dona Mathew, Jyotsna Jayaram, Padmavathi Prasad, Thomas Vallianeth

Bhashini; Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ); FAIR Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All (2026), 70 pp.

"This toolkit sets out a layered, lifecycle-oriented approach to building inclusive and robust speech artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It brings together strategies for diverse and representative data collection, linguistically informed model training, rigorous quality control, and deployment o ... more

External Link (53)

Google Scholar (35)

WorldCat (43)

De Gruyter Handbook of Media and Social Change in the Global South

Kehbuma Langmia (ed.)

Berlin: De Gruyter (2026), 600 pp.

"The birth of the newspapers, radio and television in the 19th century brought various interconnected social, behavioral and cultural changes in the lives of the colonizer and the colonized in the economically ‘developing’ nations. Then in the 20th century and now the 21st century, the birth of ... more

External Link (23)

Building an Open and Responsible Voice Technology Ecosystem: Policy Recommendations for Digital Inclusion in India

Bhashini; Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ); FAIR Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All (2026), 57 pp.

"This report examines key barriers to building open and responsible speech systems in India—from data collection and model development to infrastructure and responsible practices. It proposes policy recommendations and governance mechanisms to support an innovative and equitable voice-technology e ... cosystem. Key Recommendations: A. TREATING FOUNDATIONAL DATASETS AS PUBLIC GOODS: Foundational datasets for speech technologies are large, reusable corpora of audio, text, and metadata. They are curated to support a wide array of downstream applications, including automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and speech translation. Making foundational datasets available as digital public goods addresses market failures in voice-technology ecosystems and promotes local economic innovation. The report identifies challenges arising from the linguistic diversity and nuance of Indian languages, infrastructural barriers, the absence of common data standards that create governance gaps, and unresolved intellectual property and privacy issues. Policy recommendations for building foundational language datasets include clarifying and revisiting existing laws to enable the use of publicly available material, ensuring sustainable investments supported by government and blended finance techniques, and instituting strong governance systems with shared standards, coordinated repositories, and independent quality assurance. B. BUILDING OPEN AND REPRESENTATIVE MODELS: India’s success in inclusive voice technologies depends on whether speech systems perform well across the country’s linguistic and social diversity. Today, limited openly available datasets, inadequate evaluation benchmarks, and uneven access to compute have resulted in models that perform inconsistently across languages, accents, and demographic groups, especially those from rural, low-resource, or marginalised communities. Strengthening India’s ecosystem requires further investment in data, evaluation, and infrastructure. Benchmarking should be built around open evaluation datasets and transparent leaderboards providing common baselines for developers, improving procurement standards, and helping assess performance across diverse languages and speaker groups. On the infrastructure side, platforms such as Bhashini, ULCA, and AI Kosh offer strong foundations although effective operation hinges on sustained governance, clear access protocols, and long-term funding models. C. INSTITUTIONALISING SUSTAINABLE OPEN-SOURCE INFRASTRUCTURE: Speech datasets place far greater demands on storage, bandwidth, and compute than text data, making the financing and governance of longterm hosting a central challenge for India’s voice-tech ecosystem. A fragmented licensing landscape adds further uncertainty: overlapping or incompatible terms across data, code, model weights, and evaluation sets impose substantial compliance burdens on small actors, while enforcement gaps allow misuse with little recourse. Sustaining open, equitable development requires treating dataset hosting as durable public digital infrastructure rather than grant-based, project-specific assets. By international standards, India’s emerging platforms, such as AI Kosh, provide a remarkable foundation. However, they require longterm funding, transparent governance, and clear access pathways for non-government contributors. Collaborative stewardship models, such as the Mozilla Data Collective, can help establish shared quality norms and consistent metadata conventions. D. STRENGTHENING RESPONSIBLE DEPLOYMENT: Deploying speech technologies responsibly requires more than high-performance models; it depends on safe systems, contextually appropriate use, and clear accountability. Existing data practices lack value-sharing mechanisms, leaving communities and researchers without recognition or benefitsharing, even as their contributions fuel commercial products. Risks of misuse, including voice cloning, phishing, and deepfake-driven misinformation, are rising, and unintended harms like linguistic exclusion, biased performance across accents and genders, and the erosion of regional language identities remain widespread. Addressing these gaps requires structural guardrails that embed fairness, transparency, and accountability into deployment workflows. Preventing misuse demands a combination of technical safeguards, stronger legal pathways, and widespread public literacy efforts to help users recognise risks and exercise their rights. The report argues that a strong ecosystem requires more than innovation funding. Building open-source foundations—including language datasets, standards, collection protocols and responsible AI frameworks—promotes demand-driven local innovation. It is therefore essential that the state plays an active, shaping role, much as it has in the development of digital public infrastructure. In the context of voice technology, this involves both investing in commercially viable languages and sustaining low-resource languages that are vital for inclusion but unlikely to attract private capital. Open-source assets can reduce costs for the public and private sector alike. However, they demand long-term planning and financing for hosting, maintenance, and updates. These assets can be supported through blended-finance models that pool public, philanthropic, and commercial resources. Emerging national initiatives, such as the proposed AI marketplaces, can further structure participation, transparency, and value-sharing across data, annotation, and deployable models." (Executive summary, pages 9-11) more

Download (17)

Resource Guide on Advancing Digital Inclusion

Zeynep Varoglu, Wondwossen Mulualem Beyene et al.

Paris: UNESCO (2026), 19 pp.

"Digital inclusion is essential for equitable access to knowledge and full participation in today’s digital society. As digital public infrastructure expands, it is critical that digital transformation reduces—rather than reinforces—existing inequalities, particularly for persons with disabili ... more

Google Scholar (122)

WorldCat (136)

Télécoms en Mauritanie: L’impact des crédits de communication

Taghi Cheikhna Mohamed Taghioullah

Paris: L'Harmattan (2025), xviii, 224 pp.

"Cet ouvrage propose une lecture croisée du marketing et de la régulation dans le secteur des télécommunications mauritanien. À partir des comportements d’achat de crédit de communication, il interroge les enjeux de transparence tarifaire, d’équité et de gouvernance publique. L’auteur ... more

External Link (144)

Bridging the Digital Divide in Rural Peru with Long-Distance WiFi

Juan Antonio Paco Fernandez

ICTworks, May 13 (2025)

"In the Santiago River Basin of Peru’s Amazonas region, an ambitious initiative is underway to bridge the digital divide and bring reliable internet connectivity to rural communities. The “Connectivity for the Santiago River Basin” project, led by a multi-stakeholder alliance, aims to foster s ... more

External Link (118)

How would a sub-$30 smartphone affect Africa?

James Barton

Developing Telecoms, November 27 (2025)

"African consumers in particular struggle with the cost of 4G-capable devices - the GSMA’s recent Mobile Economy Africa Report for 2025 found that there is still a significant affordability gap, with around 58% of Africans remaining offline because smartphones are too expensive. Together with majo ... more

External Link (164)

Google Scholar (143)

WorldCat (155)

Learning, Digital Skills, and the Global South

Jeffrey James

Cheltenham (UK); Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing (2025), vi, 122 pp.

"With our modern world relying more and more on Internet-based technologies, this timely book takes a renewed look at the ever-increasing digital divide between developing and more technologically advanced countries and the resulting impacts on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Jef ... more

Download (53)

Expanding Digital Opportunity: A Framework and Road Map for Strengthening Digital Inclusion

Anne N. Junod, Corianne Scally Payton, Marokey Sawo, Lizzy Ferrara

Washington, DC: Urban Institute (2025), 82 pp.

Download (61)

The revised SADC toolkit on universal access funding and universal service fund implementation 2024

Kerron Edmunson

Geneva: ITU (2025), xi, 76 pp.

"In 2011, working with the Communications Regulators’ Association of Southern Africa (CRASA),1 the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in cooperation with the European Commission (EC) published a toolkit on universal access funding and universal service implementation to provide guidance o ... more

External Link (183)

Ericsson Mobility Report

Ericsson (2025), 31 pp.

"We are at an inflection point, where 5G and the ecosystem are set to unleash a wave of innovation. In this Ericsson Mobility Report, we explore how an ecosystem partner is leveraging 5G, network slicing and dynamic Quality of Service (QoS) that will take live broadcasting to a new level, by ensurin ... more

Download (76)

The Rise of the Network Commons: A History of Community Infrastructure

Armin Medosch

Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures (2025), 107 pp.

Download (37)

Self-sustaining Financing Solutions for Community Connectivity
Deep Insights

Carlos Rey-Moreno, Luca Belli, Senka Hadzic (eds.)

Rio de Janeiro: Internet Goverance Forum, Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity; FGV Direito Rio (2025), 148 pp.

"This book is the Official 2025 Outcome of the Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity (DC3) of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF). DC3 is a multistakeholder group, fostering a collaborative analysis of community networks (CNs), exploring how such initiatives can improve and expa ... nd connectivity while empowering Internet users. CNs are connectivity initiatives usually developed in a bottom-up fashion by groups of individuals – i.e., communities – that may contribute to the design, development and management of the network infrastructure as a common resource. Hence, CNs are usually managed according to the governance models established by their community members and may be operated by groups of self-organised individuals or entities such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), local businesses or public administrations. CNs should not be considered as a competing or antagonistic model either to the state or to the market. On the contrary, they should be seen as a powerful complementary solution to fill the existing connectivity gaps. Over the past decade, the CNs debate has evolved considerably, and the discourse surrounding these initiatives has undergone significant transformation. This evolution reflects a shift from grassroots technical experimentation to the recognition of CNs as essential instruments for digital inclusion, sovereignty, and cybersecurity, all underpinned by sustained community engagement. These issues have been systematically studied in previous DC3 annual reports, which have analysed the conceptual, regulatory, and operational frameworks for CNs through a rights-based, community-centric approach. All previous DC3 publications can be found at www.comconnectivity.org. Understanding how the community connectivity debate has evolved is essential to understand why the identification of self-sustaining financial solutions is probably the most important issue to be addressed and why such solutions may have a remarkably relevant impact for the future of connectivity. In this perspective, this volume offers a collection of evidence-based analyses and some concrete proposals aimed at promoting selfsustaining financing solutions for Community Connectivity." (Back cover) more

Download (74)

Measuring Digital Development. Facts and Figures: Focus on Landlocked Developing States
Deep Insights

Geneva: ITU (2025), iv, 33 pp.

"Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs) face unique development challenges. Higher transportation costs, trade barriers, and limited connectivity impede economic integration. LLDCs rely on neighbouring countries for access to trade routes, resulting in delays and higher costs. These countries also ... more

Download (67)

Technical study on telecommunication and ICT infrastructure data, costs and analysis in Nigeria

Geneva: ITU (2025), ix, 72 pp.

"This study analyses the costs of connecting to the Internet and providing Internet services in Nigeria for fibre-optic network connectivity, microwave links, mobile broadband cellular links, and cellular communications. The analysis has focused on the capital expenditure (capex) of telecommunicatio ... more

Download (50)

Measuring digital development: The affordability of ICT services 2024

Geneva: ITU (2025), iv, 27 pp.

"This edition’s findings highlight important progress: in 2024, mobile broadband services have become more affordable in most regions and for most income groups, and a growing number of countries are meeting the Broadband Commission’s target of entry-level broadband services costing less than 2 ... more

Download (60)

Bootstrapping the digital divide: A situational analysis of digital demands and collective capabilities in low-income households

Anthony Mc Cosker, Julie Tucker

Information, Communication & Society, volume 28, issue 1 (2025), pp. 105-123

"This paper examines intersections between social disadvantage and digital inequality in low-income household settings using situational analysis. Partnering with social service organisations, we conducted qualitative fieldwork research over 12 months with low-income households in disadvantaged subu ... more

Download (47)

Persisting inequalities in the digitalized society: Migrant women facing coercive dimensions of everyday digitalization

Ulla Buchert, Sirpa Wrede, Anne Kouvonen

Information, Communication & Society, volume 27, issue 5 (2024), pp. 935-950

"Understanding the ubiquitous digitalization of everyday life and associated inequalities presupposes rich conceptualizations of the associated social dynamics. Accordingly, we investigate digital service domestication as a social dimension of people’s lives, building on concepts that center users ... more

External Link (151)

Google Scholar (132)

WorldCat (155)

Children's digital experiences in Indian slums: Technologies, identities, and Jugaad

Kiran Vinod Bhatia

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (2024), 175 pp.

"This book departs from the universalising and rescue narratives of poor children and technologies. It offers complex stories on how children's social identities (gender, caste, and religion), cultural norms, and personal aspirations influence their digital experiences. How do children challenge, ci ... more

Self-sustaining Financing Solutions for Community Connectivity Deep Insights

Measuring Digital Development. Facts and Figures: Focus on Landlocked Developing States Deep Insights

Self-sustaining Financing Solutions for Community Connectivity
Deep Insights

Measuring Digital Development. Facts and Figures: Focus on Landlocked Developing States
Deep Insights