DCA Digital Digest: Coronavirus reveals need to bridge the digital divide

1. Coronavirus reveals need to bridge the digital divide

The global crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has pushed us further into a digital world, and changes in behaviour are likely to have lasting effects when the economy starts to pick up. But not everyone is ready to embrace a more digitized existence. A new analysis from UNCTAD maps the changing digital landscape since the last major global calamity, the 2008/09 financial crisis. It looks at how a digitally enabled world is working for some, but not all equally.

2. Africa’s tech ecosystem responds to COVID-19 Pandemic

As COVID-19 began to grow in major economies, governments and startups in Africa started measures to shift a greater volume of transactions toward digital payments and away from cash — which the World Health Organization flagged as a conduit for the spread of the coronavirus. READ ON>>

3. World turns to Mobile Money in response to COVID-19 Outbreak

Africa has reverted to using digital finance as a means to stem the spread of COVID-19. Governments and startups on the continent are implementing measures to shift a greater volume of payment transactions toward mobile money and away from cash — which the World Health Organization flagged as a conduit for the spread of the coronavirus.
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4. There’s no consensus on technology’s role in the COVID-19 response

Different countries are taking different approaches, but there’s not a single obvious solution. The answer is much more complicated than the current state of affairs, which can be summarized in three words (stay at home). Who gets to work outside the home, how and where we test people and monitor new outbreaks, where we send people who may have been exposed, and what technologies we use to make all that happen — it’s all very sketchy.
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5. Coronavirus: seven ways collective intelligence is tackling the pandemic

Tackling the emergence of a new global pandemic is a complex task. But collective intelligence is now being used around the world by communities and governments to respond. At its simplest, collective intelligence is the enhanced capacity created when distributed groups of people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilise more information, ideas and insights to solve a problem.
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