Gender

The purpose of the Arkansas Digital Skills and Opportunity Plan is to outline an actionable path forward to make digital opportunity an economic benefit and reality for all Arkansans. This plan will position the state’s residents to pursue cross-sectoral economic growth through broadband-related, nondeployment activities and enhance workforce development. The draft plan is open for public comment until January 25, 2024. ARConnect has a detailed vision for achieving digital opportunity in Arkansas: 

Governor Ned Lamont (D-CT) announced that the Connecticut Department of Administrative Services’ Commission for Educational Technology has released “Connecticut: Everyone Connected,” the state’s draft digital equity plan. This release begins a 30-day public comment period, which will end on January 20, 2024. The commission will consider all feedback and make revisions to the plan before finalizing it by the end of March 2024.

This report presents the main findings from the 2023 Statewide Survey on Broadband Adoption Survey.

For the better part of a generation, low-income and minority US communities have struggled to gain access to affordable broadband.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Steady but uneven progress in global Internet connectivity highlights the disparities of the digital divide and is leaving people in low-income countries behind. Approximately sixty-seven percent of the world's population, or 5.4 billion people, is now online.

The big ISPs certainly have their knickers in a knot over the adoption of digital discrimination rules by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC was required to adopt some version of digital discrimination rules by language included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

Here’s everything we have on deck for our November Open Meeting.

The Federal Communications Commission launched a proceeding designed to explore ways the FCC’s Mapping Broadband Health in America platform could be expanded and enhanced to help better leverage digital health tools to improve maternal care. The FCC seeks comment on issues that will help guide the next phase of this mapping platform and inform associated data analytics work concerning the relationship between broadband and maternal health.

Limited global research exists about girls’ and boys’ access to and use of mobile phones. For girls, access is much more diverse and colourful than simply whether they ‘have’ or ‘have not’ got a phone. Access is often transient, and diverse ownership, borrowership and sharing practices are flourishing. Boys are 1.5 times more likely to own a phone and 1.8 times more likely to own a smartphone. They're also more likely to use phones in more diverse and internet-enabled ways than girls. Girls are going to great lengths to gain access.

The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, the US government’s $42 billion broadband grants program, requires recipients to provide a Letter of Credit for 25% of the grant award. Alongside the additional 25% match requirement, this capital barrier will shut out a huge number of internet service providers (ISP).The small and community-centered ISPs, minority and women-owned businesses, nonprofits, and municipalities that the program claims to be targeting will be most affected.