While access to technology and associated electronic content has significantly changed the lives of many young people in wealthier economies, the same is not generally true of those in less developed economies.

The main purpose of this report is to shed light on the current situation by presenting and describing statistical information on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) by the children and youth of the world.

A secondary goal is to describe the limitations of existing statistics, and to present proposals to increase the availability and comparability of statistics on young people’s use of ICT. An important limitation, affecting both the data and the conclusions presented in this publication, is the small number of countries for which relevant data are available. While the majority of developed economies have rich datasets on individual use of ICT , data availability is poor for most developing and transition economies, and particularly poor for the least developed economies (only two of which collect any individual ICT use data).