In 2020, 71 per cent of the world’s youth (aged between 15 and 24 years) were using the Internet, compared with 57 per cent of the other age groups. On the global scale, young people were thus 1.24 times more likely to connect than the rest of the population.
In developed countries, where 90 per cent of the population is already online, the ratio was small (1.14). In developing countries the difference stood at 1.32, and in the LDCs it reached 1.53, as 34 per cent of young people were connected compared with only 22 per cent for the rest of the population. For Africa the ratio was 1.47, and for the Asia-Pacific region it was 1.35.
The greater uptake among young people bodes well for connectivity in areas where the demographic profile is skewed towards youth, such as the LDCs, where half of the population is less than 20 years old. It means that the workforce will become more connected and technology-savvy as the young generation joins its ranks. This in turn could improve the development prospects of these regions.