Truth Number One: The Divide is widening, not narrowing, and at an ever-increasing rate.

 

Truth Number Two: Closing the Digital Divide may be the only way to make globalization work for the poor.

 

Truth Number Three: The consequence of not closing the Divide is terrorism – because closing the Divide is the only way to restore the “social contract” that returns a sense of fairness to each nation. Without fairness, extremism flourishes.

 

Truth Number Four: Closing the Digital Divide is fundamentally about empowerment, that is, it is about using new technologies to empower the poor just as they now empower the rich.

 

Truth Number Five: Closing the Digital Divide is the only way to sustain the growth of world markets.

 

Truth Number Six: World leaders from every sector — business, government, academia, NGOs — can benefit from closing the Divide. Yet no one sector has the incentives to lead the effort to close the Divide. That is why it is so difficult to achieve the political will needed to close Digital Divide.

 

Truth Number Seven: Closing the Digital Divide requires building an “ecosystem” that offers “end to end solutions” which empower low-income citizens.

 

Truth Number Eight: The lower middle class in middle-income countries, not the poorest citizens of the poorest countries, are the best settings for experimental efforts to close the Digital Divide. The world’s poorest in fact will benefit by broadband development earmarked for the middle of the pyramid. (Watch this site for our ideas on this theme which we call “MOPenomics” – the macroeconomics of the middle of the pyramid.)

 

Truth Number Nine: Closing the digital divide involves using new technologies to formalize the “informal economy,” thereby bringing the poor into established markets.

 

Truth Number Ten: To close digital divide, the bottom five bilion world population (and the institutons which serve them) must be given broadband ecosystems, meaningfully deployed.