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Disrupting Development with Digital Technologies is the Brookings Blum Roundtable 2015 post-conference report which focuses on the ways in which new digital technologies might change global development process. One of the main questions posed throughout the Brookings Blum Roundtable was the policy challenges and risks that will probably emerge by the imposition of the new digital economy environment.
Focusing on the world’ s poorest areas and the ways in which global digital inclusion could be maximized, the report stresses that:
With universal digital inclusion, poor people are empowered to participate in formal networks that enable them to communicate, to transact and access basic financial services, to obtain information, and to claim rights and recognition.
Inclusive digital development is considered to be an effective tool for low-income people, making them capable of navigating their own way out of poverty because they have growing access to markets and information and can assert their identities.
Four essays are presented in the report, covering issues regarding digital money revolution, internet connectivity, knowledge networks and digital economy.
The ability to distribute money to poor people digitally’¦has the potential to change both the logic and practice of the aid industry.
Connectivity is at its core a social relationship, or at least depends for its functionality on social interactions that are trusted.
There is a tremendous opportunity to empower poor people by enabling them to use their own data.
One of the great challenges of the digital economy is how to connect the range of use specific activities that are emerging.
Download the full report here.