The WBA Digital Inclusion Benchmark measures and ranks the world's most influential companies on their efforts to advance digital inclusion, tracking how companies are expanding access to digital technologies, improving digital skills and literacy, and ensuring safe and inclusive digital environments for all. The 2026 edition assessed 200 companies across key sectors of the digital economy including telecommunications, software, hardware, and digital platforms. The benchmark is developed in close collaboration with an Expert Review Committee and partners including GRI, ITU, and the Alliance for Affordable Internet, with a methodology designed to incentivise companies to understand where digital exclusion risks are highest and act to bridge the digital divide, while keeping human rights and social impacts at its core.
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SDG target 4.4 aims to ‘substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship.’ As digital technology permeates all sectors, digital skills have become essential for general employability and entrepreneurship.
Additional digital skills beyond digital literacy are important for people's livelihoods. Such digital skills include web design, desktop publishing and digital marketing, which prepare students for jobs in these areas or help entrepreneurs use these tools to publicise and grow their business. They also include technical digital skills that are needed to become a specialist in digital professions, such as data analysis, hardware design, network management and software programming. There is a large technological skills gap across gender and income and between high-income and low- and middle- income countries.
Research Guidance:
The company provides evidence of commitment to digitalskills developmentthrough long-term investments, continued programme delivery, and/or institutional mechanisms that ensure continuity and scale over time. To meet this element, the company must provide evidence of one or more of the following:
- evidence that digitalskills developmentis not treated as a short-term commitment or ad hoc issue, but rather as a core area of sustained socialinvestment;
- Evidence of having more than one programme running to support digitalskillsdevelopment;
- Evidence of a multi-year roadmap and dedicated multi-year funding for supporting digitalskillsdevelopment for women, workers, unemployedpeopleor youth.