Marie Cohen-Skalli

Q1: What is the situation regarding digital exclusion today?

In France, 13 million people are digitally illiterate, meaning they’re unable to use digital technology in everyday life. Moreover, 24% of French people don’t know how to find the slightest piece of information online, according to France’s national office of statistics INSEE. That means that one person in three lacks a basic digital skill among the people around you in France. But the digital divide isn’t just about inequality in skills. Access to tools is a vital issue upstream and is a long way from being resolved. Around eight million people still don’t have internet access because they haven’t got the right equipment, according to 2019 data from INSEE. Contrary to preconceived ideas, there are many categories of people affected by this exclusion. The purpose of Emmaüs Connect is to support the most vulnerable, which includes young people trying to get into the job market, immigrants, senior citizens in a precarious situation, the homeless, and unqualified or unskilled people.

Q2: How do you help reduce the divide?

Emmaüs Connect operates in all aspects of the digital divide by offering equipment, connection means and support for essential skills.

Equipment: Of course, equipment is vital to tackling digital exclusion and advancing, so at welcome centres Emmaüs Connect makes available various stocks of digital equipment – laptops, smartphones, tablets, basic telephones and so on – at socially responsible prices. Hardware is mainly collected from firms via our LaCollecte.tech hardware reuse platform, then refurbished by partner refurbishers and made available to members of the public in need at socially responsible prices.

Connection: People who live in substandard housing or who can’t open a bank account don’t have access to mobile or internet subscriptions, so have to buy prepaid cards at high prices. For this reason, Emmaüs Connect offers, with support from French telephone firm SFR, prepaid telephone and internet cards at socially responsible prices – they’re 40% less expensive. Advice meet-ups are also offered to help people choose a subscription, as are mediation meet-ups to resolve any conflicts with a telephone firm.

Support: The last crucial stage towards digital independence is the acquisition of minimum skills. Emmaüs Connect organises, free of charge, collective initiation workshops and a connected individualised service every day at its welcome centre and beyond its walls. Through its training service, the association also trains hundreds of professionals in the social sector each year in digital inclusion techniques so they can themselves support the people they work with.

Q3: How do you support digital emancipation?

Through our way of working we can remove obstacles to digital technology. By offering equipment and connection means at socially responsible prices, we help people in difficulty enjoy digital technology. Mental barriers to digital technology – fear of making a mistake, fear of not knowing how to use the technology – are too often overlooked, yet they play a big role. That’s why we put humaneness at the heart of our support through our community of 900 volunteers in action throughout France. We also work with over 9,000 professionals in social action so they can adopt our expertise and so the number of players in digital inclusion can be increased through our network Les Relais Numériques.

Q4: What are the concrete results of your partnerships with firms that support you?

The fight against the digital divide requires a variety of resources in terms of equipment, connection means and training. We rely on an ever stronger value chain of solidarity that includes firms who donate, local authorities, the French state, socially minded refurbishers, and, of course, partner social entities who identify people in difficulty. To date, the results have been very encouraging: the LaCollecte.tech network, with which we began a project in access to hardware, collected 12,000 items of equipment in eight months, ten times more than what we were able to collect three years ago. The network Les Relais Numériques is a wide system throughout France with around 200 social entities that have become partners in the space of a year. Just eighteen months ago, we were only present in eleven towns

in France. Each partnership is focused on a concrete local or national action, the impact of which can be measured through its beneficiaries: we know that a smartphone or prepaid top-up voucher at a socially responsible price can change the everyday life and disposable income of someone in a precarious situation. Sometimes, the impact goes further, but that becomes more difficult to measure. For example, a computer can help a whole family enjoy a normal life with access to online schooling and social rights, for example. There are also effects on a larger scale on the training of helpers: by training a single social entity to advance digital inclusion, we have an indirect impact on hundreds, even thousands, of people who, in the future, will be helped by this entity near them. So we know that Emmaüs Connect has empowered around 100,000 people in difficulty since 2013 in its welcome centres, but the indirect impact is much broader thanks to the strength of these partnerships.

Q5: To help, what can we do on an individual level in each firm?

You can find out what’s going to become of your work computer and entrust it to a player in solidarity like LaCollecte.tech or give your time to support people cut off from digital technology. Each person at their own level can act to make digital technology an opportunity for everyone!