By Lance Pierce, CEO, NetHope
Last week, the world came together in New York for the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA 79) and New York Climate Week. NetHope has just wrapped up a week of meetings, roundtables, and events in New York with our Member organizations, our tech sector partners, and international thought leaders and policymakers with whom we collaborate across our global community.
UNGA 79 has wound to a close with two milestone accomplishments. World leaders deliberated and passed the Pact for the Future, a re-grounding in the rights-based founding principles of the United Nations with a commitment to shape international development, finance, science, innovation, and governance with a focus on the youth of today—who will be tomorrow’s adult leaders—and for the benefit of generations as yet unborn. As part of the Pact for the Future, UNGA 79 also passed the Global Digital Compact, with the following objectives:
Almost immediately following the enactment of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, countries and civil society recognized that a serious pursuit of these goals would fundamentally alter our methods of data collection and utilization, as well as our investments in digital infrastructure, skills, and architectures necessary for their implementation. In many circles, people would talk about digital as the horizontal enabler of the goals across all issue areas and sometimes as the missing “18th goal." The Global Digital Compact is an overdue consensus by the world's governments on the importance of digital for everything we do today, as well as a strong statement of the need to place present and future human well-being, sustainability, local priorities, and the vital importance of peace and cooperation on a small planet ahead of shorter-term concerns.
None of these priorities are, of course, new to the NetHope community. For over two decades, NetHope has been working with our global civil society Member organizations, our innovative tech sector company partners, and a variety of UN agencies in emergency humanitarian relief, long-term development, and global conservation to achieve very similar objectives.
NetHope’s work with our Member community around the world has surfaced a desire to work together in this new era of cooperation on the “New Digital Divides.” Some of these divides are rooted in the original digital divides, such as connectivity. In a world where over 2.6 billion people, or a third of humanity, do not have access to the digital economy or the opportunities presented by being online, there is still much work to do in these spaces. However, the discussion of new digital divides, which were less prevalent 23 years ago during NetHope's founding, now dominates the work we must all undertake in this era. Digital skills and leadership are critical to being able to use these technologies successfully. A large number of people around the world have not had the opportunity to gain the skills required to navigate the digital economy effectively or even succeed in their own organizations. NetHope is putting forth a new generation of work for a new generation of people in underinvested local organizations who partner with our big INGO Members, who are ready and demanding of upskilling and leadership capabilities to pursue their own goals.
Digital protection was likewise an area that was little discussed in the early days of the internet. We developed the internet for openness and resiliency, which has contributed to its widespread use. However, in today's world, when cyberattacks and data theft aggressively target civil society and nonprofits, we in the NetHope community understand the importance of this issue. If we minimize or discount these new and alarming risks posed by cyber threats, we will unwittingly assist bad actors in causing harm to the people we exist to serve.
People perceive innovation as a fundamental aspect of digital technology, and generative AI and related tools are currently accelerating innovation. In the original focus on the digital divide, people didn’t think much about how to integrate new tools and services, but the spread of cloud, broadband, satellite, mobile, edge computing, and a host of other enabling technologies now available in more places than ever before means that we must also integrate AI and these new and mainstreaming paradigms into how we think about digital inclusion.
The final New Digital Divides we work on across the NetHope community are both social and environmental. At Climate Week in New York, leaders across the spectrum affirmed the importance of digital and data technologies in helping mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, as well as for the resilience of people and communities who are living on the frontlines of a changing climate. NetHope's work on Climate Intersections is central to these issues, as every member organization in our community, regardless of their approach, is grappling with how to serve communities amidst this fundamental change.
Lastly, I mentioned digital inclusion. The days of developing programs or services, adding a digital or data strategy later, adding digital protection on top of it, and then bolting on or siloing off considerations of skills or operating environment are long gone. The NetHope community understands the need to approach all programming with a comprehensive perspective, integrating these elements from the outset during the design and theory of change stages. NetHope’s own approach to localizing the benefits of this thinking is to work through our Member organizations, through our robust Regional Chapter network in 6 regions of the world, to help bring digital transformation through the full supply and delivery chain of aid and support. If local people and local organizations—who are themselves the “last mile” of aid and service delivery—are equal and vocal partners in this effort, everyone will benefit.
We’d like to thank our more than 60 international Member civil society organizations for their commitment to work through NetHope, many of whom we saw this past week in New York. We’d also like to thank our partners like Accenture, Amazon Web Services, Google, Meta, Salesforce, Microsoft, Society for International Development, United States, Bay Area Global Health Alliance, the United Nations Association, National Capital Area Chapter, and so many others, and especially the terrific Concordia team for their support in helping facilitate important dialogues.
UN pacts and compacts don’t have the force of law, and to be sure, for long-time observers and advocates for higher-bar standards from the world body, they don’t always hit their aspirations. The Pact for the Future and the Global Digital Compact have already been subject to these same criticisms. UN agreements however do embody the momentum of a consensus among nations. They help provide a common framework within which all of us can pursue common goals, public goods, and shared outcomes. As UNGA Week and Climate Week recede, we have our sights set on continuing this conversation at the next big gathering of tech, policy, global, and local leaders, helping local communities claim the benefits of the digital economy for their own interests and purposes.
We hope you can join us in Washington, DC, for the next NetHope Annual Global Summit in late October. We look forward to seeing you there and working with you at every step.
Additional Resources:
