The deployment of digital technologies in African cities, beyond improving service delivery, raises issues of digital inclusion, digital rights, and increasing spatial and social inequalities. As part of the African Cities Lab Summit 2023, we conducted a workshop with 20 multidisciplinary participants to explore issues related to the deployment of digital technologies in African cities. This research is a policy paper that addresses these issues and provides policy recommendations for local governments. It emphasizes the importance of inclusive digital infrastructure, regulations safeguarding vulnerable sectors, and governance ensuring citizens’ rights in the digital transformation. Focusing on transparency, equity, and collaboration with communities, local governments play a vital role in fostering inclusive digital transformation, essential for equitable and rights-centric smart cities in Africa.

Cet article s’intéresse aux inégalités numériques qui touchent l’accès aux services publics, et plus précisément à la justice. Au Québec, les plumitifs sont des registres publics qui retracent l’historique judiciaire des justiciables, et ils sont disponibles en ligne. Dans une perspective d’accès à la justice, cet article aborde la tension existante entre les objectifs de la numérisation des services publics et les inégalités d’accès au numérique, en s’intéressant au cas des plumitifs au Québec. Nous retraçons l’évolution des approches en termes d’inégalités numériques en insistant sur la nécessité de dépasser la question de l’accès matériel aux services numériques pour nous intéresser aussi aux inégalités socio-économiques préexistantes. Nous analysons les difficultés d’accès aux plumitifs et l’usage qui en sont fait à la lumière des différentes dimensions de l’accès numérique selon Jan van Dijk (2006) afin d’envisager des pistes de solutions concrètes et efficaces pour améliorer l’accès aux plumitifs et plus largement à la justice.

Older people have increasingly been using the new information and communication technologies (ICTs), namely the internet. Seeking to contribute with substantive information on their digital inclusion, this paper focuses on the adoption and use of ICTs by older adults, highlighting their experiences and considering their plurality. Taking a qualitative approach, the core goal of the empirical research underlying this paper was to understand what mechanisms and modalities configure the relationship of older internet users with the new ICTs. With that objective in mind, interviews were conducted with 20 internet users over the age of 60. Those interviews, which included a biographical element, were subjected to multi-categorical analysis. Results suggest a typology of modes of relating to the new ICTs among older internet users that reflects different trajectories, practices, skills, significances and impacts. The analysis shows how life trajectories and differentiated uses are reflected in equally differentiated impacts for older adults, contributing to their quality of life in different ways and to different degrees. Digital skills play a fundamental role in enhancing or limiting those effects. The results of this research help break down the stereotypes associated with the older generations and may have relevant implications for the design of digital inclusion policies and initiatives.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an increased need to conduct research and community engagement using digital methods. Unfortunately, the shift away from in-person research activities can make it difficult to engage and recruit participants from under-resourced communities that lack adequate digital infrastructure. At the beginning of the pandemic, our team recognized that imminent lockdowns would significantly disrupt ongoing engagement with low-income housing resident community partners and that we would ultimately bear responsibility if that occurred. This manuscript outlines the development of methods designed to create capacity for virtual engagement with a community advisory board that were subsequently applied to a longitudinal mixed-methods study. We describe how our experience engaging low-income housing residents during the height of the pandemic influenced the approach and offer guidelines useful for engaging under-resourced communities regardless of setting. Of these, a strong commitment to providing technology, unlimited data connectivity, and basic digital literacy training/technical support is most important. While each of these is essential and failure in any one area will reduce overall effectiveness of the effort, providing adequate technical support while maintaining ongoing relationships with community members is the most important and resource-intensive.

In many parts of the world, older adults continue to face significant barriers to digital inclusion, but the source of that inequality is not well understood. However, we do not know enough about differences among older people seeking to improve their digital skills. Examining the impact of a national three-year digital inclusion programme reaching more than 580,000 older adults in Australia, this study explores factors that affect digital skills and literacy later in life. A mixed-methods approach involving a two time-point survey (N = 337) along with participant interviews (N = 30) examined the effectiveness of programme elements. A latent class analysis was applied to examine differences in the way older adults engage with digital technologies. Qualitative analysis helped to detail those differences. Programme outcomes were far from uniform, reflecting diverse motivations, lifecourse experiences, needs and capabilities among older adults, countering much existing research that tends to elide those differences. With reference to the concept of situated literacies, we highlight the importance of life experiences, needs and motivations to the outcomes of digital inclusion interventions. Our findings emphasise the need to disaggregate older adult internet users, and account for differences in life experiences, needs and motivations in the design and delivery of digital inclusion interventions at scale.