Amara is a subsistence farmer in rural Mali. She has never accessed a weather forecast online, checked a commodity price, or received a digital payment. Living 40km from the nearest town, she has no access to a mobile network. Each season, she plants by instinct and sells at whatever price the local trader offers because she has no means of checking the market or negotiating on equal terms.

Her situation is not unique. Hundreds of millions of people are technically within range of a signal, but lack the devices, data plans, or basic digital skills to make use of it. For them, the internet – and everything it enables – remains out of reach.

The consequences are measured in missed medical appointments, lost income, interrupted education, and constrained lives. These are some of the issues Huawei is seeking to address through its digital inclusion efforts under the ITU Partner2Connect (P2C) Digital Coalition – a global effort involving governments, companies, and civil society to connect the hardest-to-reach communities before the rollout of AI makes the divide permanent.

In 2022, Huawei pledged to connect 120 million people in remote areas by 2025. At the TECH Cares Forum in Barcelona, Yang Chaobin, CEO of the firm’s ICT Business Group, announced the target had been surpassed, saying, “By the end of 2025, we had worked with our customers to help 170 million people in the remote regions of more than 80 countries connect to the digital world.”

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