How Can the Digital Economy Serve Everyone?

A few years ago, I was attending a conference in Cairo when I noticed something strange. Every time I ordered a ride through a ride-hailing app, drivers kept canceling. After several failed attempts, a hotel doorman asked me a simple question: “Are you paying by card or cash?”
I had selected card payment. The moment I switched to cash, rides arrived instantly.
The drivers later explained why. They needed cash immediately to buy petrol and continue working. Waiting days for digital payments to clear simply wasn’t an option.
After more than 20 years working in inclusive and digital finance, that moment was a wake-up call because it exposed the limits of what we thought was a self-evident truth: the digital economy does not work equally for everyone.

Digital is not always better
We often talk about expanding access to technology, but access alone is not the same as inclusion. A platform, app, or digital payment system may look efficient from the outside while quietly excluding the people with the least financial cushion.
And this challenge is not limited to developing countries. The digital economy has become unavoidable almost everywhere. Whether opening a bank account, applying for benefits, paying for transport, or accessing healthcare, digital systems increasingly shape daily life.
When I first moved to Amsterdam, I walked into an ABN AMRO branch hoping to open an account, only to discover that even scheduling an appointment had to be done online.
Digital systems are becoming the default infrastructure of modern society. But digital does not automatically mean better.

Digital divide is real
Globally, billions of people remain excluded from meaningful participation in the digital economy. Women, rural communities, migrants, older populations, and small businesses often face barriers that technology alone cannot solve.
Take India, widely praised for its digital public infrastructure. Despite major advances in digital payments and identity systems, women continue to lag behind in internet access, mobile phone ownership, and workforce participation. Social norms, safety concerns, affordability, and discrimination still shape who benefits economically from digital transformation.
Infrastructure matters. But human realities matter more.
The same is true for small businesses. During the pandemic, many neighborhood shops joined e-commerce platforms to survive lockdowns and reach customers online. Initially, these platforms expanded opportunity. But over time, many small merchants discovered the trade-offs: fierce competition, shrinking margins, and growing dependence on large technology platforms that control visibility, pricing, and customer access.4

Power concentration in the digital age
The emergence of highly dominant platform raises a larger question about power in the digital age.
Historically, colonial powers extracted natural resources and wealth. Today, many of the world’s largest technology companies extract something different: data. Modern platforms collect enormous amounts of information that help them strengthen their market dominance and shape consumer behavior at unprecedented scale.
Traditional regulation has struggled to keep pace because digital monopolies are not built only on market share. They are built on data, algorithms, and network effects.
That is why governments alone cannot solve these challenges. Civil society, researchers, journalists, and consumers all have an important role to play in demanding accountability and transparency. Most people do not have the time or expertise to understand lengthy privacy agreements or opaque algorithms that increasingly influence access to jobs, finance, and public services.

The future of the digital economy is still being written. Technology itself is not the problem. The digital economy has created extraordinary opportunities for communication, entrepreneurship, finance, and innovation. But if systems are designed primarily for efficiency and scale, without considering local realities and unequal starting points, they will deepen existing inequalities.
The real question is not whether the world will become more digital. It already has.

The question is whether we will build a digital economy that serves everyone — or only those already positioned to benefit from it.