Digital Poverty in the Global South

Despite substantial digital investment and stakeholder initiatives, billions in the Global South remain excluded from digital participation. This systematic literature review synthesizes 122 empirical studies published between 2003 and 2024 in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania to analyze key stakeholders, their challenges, and the strategies employed to foster sustainable digital inclusion. Drawing on stakeholder theory and digital ecosystems theory, the study identifies ecosystem fragmentation as a central bottleneck. We advance stakeholder theory by introducing the concept of Ecosystem Coordination Stakeholders (ECS), a role-based stakeholder group whose salience derives from coordination capability alongside power, legitimacy, and urgency. The findings highlight the need for policy frameworks that develop and strengthen institutional capacity for coordination, extend ecosystems theory by recognizing coordination as an architectural developmental need, and highlight the importance of design strategies responsive to specific fragmentation patterns in diverse regional contexts. Our study also reveals that work remains concentrated in Asia and Africa, with continued Global North–Global South inequities in authorship and journal visibility. This study offers management and policy insights on digital poverty that may also apply to other complex challenges requiring effective and sustained multi-stakeholder collaboration.