A Closer Look at the Digital Divide
By Michael Wan, Bradford Loh, and Brian Tan
While COVID-19 has accelerated many of the transformations that were already happening, it has also sharpened the divide between different groups.
One such fault-line is the digital divide.
We examine this issue in detail in this article, and flesh it out using existing research, together with results from our annual youth survey with the World Economic Forum.
The digital divide is not just about physical access
When mentioning the digital divide, what typically comes to most people’s minds is access to a smartphone and internet.
However, the issue of the digital divide is more complex and extends beyond just the binary idea of physical access.
Based on existing research, this can be broken down further into four ‘hurdles’ or ‘barriers’ (see flowchart below and links here and here):
- 1st barrier — Motivation: This is driven by the lack of interest and/or fear of new technologies, which deters people from even trying them out in the first place.
- 2nd barrier — Physical access: Physical access goes beyond the lack of access to the internet and mobile phones, but is also about the quality of access.
- 3rd barrier — Digital skills: Lack of digital skills include needing to learn how to operate technologies, and also the literacy to search, select, and process information from a variety of digital sources.
- 4th barrier — Usage: Finally, some may lack the opportunity to use digital tools, even if they have the motivation, access, and skills. For instance, even though someone may have picked up programming skills, the person may not have the chance to practice as his or her work does not require it.
These four ‘barriers’ to digital access — motivation, physical access, digital skills, and usage — interact with and ultimately reinforce existing social inequalities as manifested through education, gender and job type, among others (see flowchart above).
COVID-19 has sharpened the digital divide in ASEAN
Bringing it closer to home, our annual survey of 70,000 youths in ASEAN illustrates some of the digital access barriers youths in our region experienced during COVID-19.
1st barrier: High cost and low quality of internet
Although our survey respondents are technically internet users to begin with, a surprisingly high proportion indicated that cost of internet access or internet quality was a significant barrier during the pandemic (see infographic below).
What this shows is that access to the internet is not binary, and is instead a spectrum of varying levels of usage quality and intensity. This dichotomy became especially pertinent during the pandemic, when many youths were forced to shift towards remote working and studying.
While internet penetration rates have improved tremendously across ASEAN helped by efforts from governments, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about additional challenges to the issue of ‘physical access’ to digital.
2nd barrier: Lack of digital skills is most binding
Our survey also found that lack of digital skills was the most binding constraint to remote working or studying during the COVID-19 pandemic for ASEAN youths.
While the digital skills constraint was not the most commonly cited, it was the most “binding”. Youths who mentioned digital skills as a barrier tend to struggle the most with remote working.
It’s important to note that there is a wide spectrum when we talk about digital skills barriers.
For instance, according to Van Dijk (2020), digital skills at its very basic core starts from the technical and formal, ranging from just operating a mobile application to browsing the internet. It gradually advances towards content-related skills, such as searching and evaluating the right information, communication skills, and also being able to generate content on the internet.
The last type of digital skill, and perhaps the most difficult to achieve, is the strategic skill of using the internet as a means to reach a particular professional and personal goal.
3rd barrier: Usage — Youths who did not use digital tools faced greater difficulties in remote working or studying
Looking beyond physical access and digital skills, our survey also allows us to investigate usage of digital tools during COVID-19 in ASEAN, and infer their relationship with economic outcomes during the pandemic.
First, we found that a decent proportion of our respondents were not able to benefit from usage of digital tools even during the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, 15% of our respondents did not use e-commerce apps to shop online during the lockdown period. This was also true across different apps to varying degrees.
This low usage of digital tools could potentially be attributed to a range of factors, including the lack of opportunities to utilise them be it at work or on in their daily lives.
Second, we found that lower usage of digital tools was strongly correlated with weaker outcomes during the pandemic (see chart below).
This was particularly true for users who were not able to use more essential digital tools during the pandemic, such as e-commerce, e-banking, and e-wallets.
For example, 78% of youths who did not pick up e-commerce buying found remote working or studying difficult, compared with 69% across our entire sample (see chart below).
Economic and social outcomes: Lack of digital access reinforced existing social inequalities
Lastly our analysis shows that vulnerable groups who faced greater barriers in accessing digital, were generally more likely to face difficulties in working remotely or studying.
These groups include those:
- Living outside the capital region.
- Working in organisations perhaps with lower job income security, including the gig economy and charities and social enterprises.
- In sectors which were more directly impacted by COVID-19, such as agriculture, educators and students.
- Without college education.
Digital inclusion is one of the keys to sustainable growth post-pandemic
COVID-19 has revealed the importance of digital technologies for our daily lives, from everyone ranging from consumers to small businesses.
Nonetheless, it has also shown that those who are excluded from this process, perhaps for the variety of reasons mentioned above, can face even greater challenges to improving their outcomes in lives.
It’s heartening to note that many governments in our region are taking proactive steps to help improve digital inclusion to prime our region for more sustainable and inclusive growth. For instance, Singapore has pushed through the Digital Readiness blueprint, while Indonesia has also implemented several subsidies and incentives to help SMEs to go online.
Brian Tan is an intern with Sea Insights. We thank him for his contribution to this article.
