The mobile industry claims a longstanding history of alignment with the U.N.'s sustainable development goals (SDGs), and now GSMA is urging telecom operators to measure and report metrics related to digital inclusion, climate, and digital human rights.

"We thought [SDGs] are a great framework to start with because that's telling us what society needs in terms of key pressing global issues," Alix Jagueneau, who leads external affairs for the industry trade group, said during a panel at this week's MWC Barcelona event.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is "looking at how to create impact management standards" by collecting best practices for placing SDG-related impact at the core of business strategy, management and operations, governance, and reporting, Robert Opp, United Nations Development Program (UNDP) chief digital officer said. "Measurement is critical, but it's not enough if you're not getting your management processes aligned as well."

In order to achieve the SDGs — many of which were thrown off track thanks to the pandemic — "we are going to need to bridge the digital divide," Opp explained. "The way we're going to do that needs to be in a holistic way. It needs to be a multi-sector approach. It needs to be one that has people at the center."

UNDP released a digital strategy that "focuses precisely on this issue," Opp said. The UNDP's SDG Impact Standards outline a unified management approach for measuring and reporting against the U.N.'s 17 sustainable development goals, and according to the GSMA, complement its initiatives to bolster digital inclusion and lessen the digital divide.

French operator Orange claims it sees the connectivity gap decreasing, although there are geographic areas — especially where Orange operates in Africa — that need more connectivity, Antoine de Clerck, societal responsibility director at Orange, said during the panel discussion. According to Jagueneau, 450 million people are negatively impacted by the connectivity gap.

Part of the digital divide's complexity is that it's financially influenced. Growing closer to a solution for this connectivity issue means finding an economic balance "between covering the least dense areas and what the company can invest," de Clerck explained.

With the digital divide continuing to close, Orange's larger focus is the usage gap, which refers to people under network coverage who aren't able to use the internet for basic digital services like buying a train ticket or completing a homework assignment. The usage gap is much wider than the gap in connectivity, Jagueneau said, and impacts more than 3 billion people.

In Europe, 24% of the population is negatively affected by the usage gap, de Clerck said. "We cannot be sustainable in the long term if half of the population of the world is excluded" from accessing the benefits of basic connectivity.

To address this usage gap, Orange operates digital centers around the world where its employees volunteer to teach digital literacy skills to vulnerable communities.