The Human Opportunities Index (HOI) assesses whether access to a service is shaped by circumstances for which people are not responsible. For Internet access, it relates the share of people connected to the extent to which connections are concentrated among particular circumstance groups. The classification may be based on a child’s gender, parents’ education, per-capita household income, number of siblings, whether both parents live in the household, the gender of the household head, and urban or rural residence. The index may rise because Internet access expands, because disparities between groups narrow, or because both changes occur. Unlike a coverage statistic alone, the HOI captures an equity dimension: two populations with the same access rate may receive different index values if access is distributed differently across circumstance groups.
Source: World Bank Open Data (source). This glossary entry was independently prepared from the cited open-data metadata; changes were made.