CTO/05
2026
The encouraging news is that the most promising solutions are already running, and they come from developing economies rather than being imported into them. Brazil offers the clearest lesson. Rather than relying on three large operators to cover the country, its regulator enabled a market of some 16,000 to 20,000 mostly local internet providers. Regional providers now hold more than half the national market. Many serve fewer than 5,000 customers each, often lower income rural communities, frequently using shared connections and unlicensed spectrum to keep costs down. The lever that made this possible was regulatory: licensing that welcomed thousands of small players rather than protecting a handful of large ones. Most developing countries still expect the big operators to do all the connecting. Brazil shows why that instinct is short-sighted. Kenya provides two more. M-Pesa, a home-grown mobile money system, reshaped financial inclusion in a way that could only have emerged from a low income context. More recently, a plan to turn the country's 74,000 power transformers into Wi-Fi hotspots aims to use existing electricity infrastructure to cut the cost of reaching people, starting with 25,000 sites. India's BharatNet Rural connectivity programme, for all its delays, demonstrates what a sustained national rural connectivity strategy looks like at scale, and what to avoid in implementing one. WHAT WORKS, AND WHERE IT COMES FROM – LESSONS FROM BRAZIL, INDIA AND KENYA
The common thread is that these solutions are local, home-grown and democratic, built from the bottom up rather than imposed from the top down. A practical connectivity agenda for the CTO Three of the CTO's existing strengths map directly onto this challenge. On strategy, the CTO can press member states to develop living digital divide strategies tailored to their own conditions, rather than the box-ticking broadband plans that gather dust. The strategy a Pacific island state needs is not the strategy Malawi needs, and neither should be a copy of a developed-country template. On regulation, the levers are well understood and underused: wholesale competition, universal service regulation linked to the World Bank's market-gap approach, and licensing that democratises the market in the way Brazil did.
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