Last Push to Internet Penetration

📊 Did You Know?

According to a dataset from the World Bank, World Population Review's Internet Penetration by Country 2025 shows that only four countries have 100% internet penetration: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain. Even in wealthy nations, achieving full penetration is challenging, and some regions within a country often have disconnected populations.

📖 The Story

Who, When, and Where — Context

Kosovo, one of Europe’s poorest countries, started implementing the five-year Kosovo Digital Economy Project (KODE) in 2018 as a collective effort by the government, internet operators, and the World Bank.

Why — Challenge

Like in the other developing countries, access to high-speed internet was a privilege few could afford in Kosovo. Commonly, internet infrastructure is deployed around cities, while people who can most benefit from a digital lifeline are the ones in remote areas. As a result, the digital divide makes socio-economic inequality tangible in many ways, such as opportunities for work, education, social services, or entertainment.

What and How — Tech Solution

Through grants, the KODE project matched the internet operators’ costs to build their networks in unconnected villages. Multiple network construction projects ran in parallel, and each project, the government awarded grants to the lowest-cost network solutions to cover a fraction (not all) of their costs. The competition and co-funding model, together with a requirement for a delivered network’s speed (100 Mbps minimum) and its regulated price, allowed the government to increase the country’s internet adoption efficiently and effectively, especially in rural areas.

💡 Key Insights

• 💻️ Inaccessibility to and unaffordability of high-speed internet in remote communities are common challenges regardless of the continent and region.

• 💰️ Healthy competition reduces the costs of development work and allows donors to distribute their funds more effectively. Not every use of money is equally effective, and there is a mechanism to change the game.

• 🤝 Cooperation between the local private and public sectors, as well as an international third party, is essential to achieve an ambitious goal.

✅ Try This

Learn the state of Kosovo’s digitization at Digital 2024: Kosovo. A slide deck at the bottom of the page shows how their internet adoption has changed over the years, and we see a noticeable rise in 2018-2019. This may suggest the impact of the KODE project.