Digital skills and who is left out

Ukraine moved a large number of public services onto a single application, which is a genuine achievement. The interesting question is what happens to the people who cannot use it.

Who is actually excluded

Older people, most obviously, though less uniformly than assumed — a substantial number use smartphones competently and the assumption otherwise is itself a problem.

People in areas with poor connectivity, which is a rural infrastructure question rather than a skills one.

People without a smartphone, which correlates with low income.

People with disabilities, where the barrier is application design rather than the person.

And people without documents in order, who cannot verify identity digitally and are frequently the ones most in need of the service.

What the response has been

A national digital literacy programme with free online courses, taught in short modules, distributed through libraries, schools and community centres.

Physical points where a person can be helped through a digital process by someone else — which is the honest solution, because it accepts that not everyone will learn and serves them anyway.

And retention of paper and in-person channels alongside the digital ones.

The design principle worth stating

Digital-by-default is fine. Digital-only is a decision to stop serving a proportion of the population, and it should be made explicitly if it is made at all.

What the evidence suggests

Uptake among older users has been higher than expected where someone showed them once, in person, patiently. That is a staffing question rather than a technology one, and it is the cheapest part of the whole programme.

That the excluded do not become invisible but do become harder to serve is the most important part of the design. I use the same principle in company systems — a digital channel can be the default and cannot be the only one. That is what the evidence shows too: the number without a phone falls and never reaches zero, and the remainder is usually the group that needs the service most.