The review was deliberately broad in scope. Rather than a narrow systematic review focused on a single population or intervention, the authors employed PRISMA-ScR guidelines to capture the breadth and diversity of evidence across three continents. Starting from 1,387 records identified in Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, the team screened out 81 non-English documents, 775 conference papers, books, theses, and other ineligible formats, and 439 irrelevant or inaccessible studies, ultimately retaining 92 sources: 77 original journal articles, 7 review articles, and 8 official reports. Fifty-eight studies were quantitative, 22 qualitative, 4 mixed-methods, and 8 were official reports. Geographically, Asia contributed 30 studies, Africa 27, South America 9, with the remainder drawn from Europe, North America, Australia, and global datasets. The authors note that roughly 83% of the included literature appeared between 2020 and 2024, signaling rapidly accelerating scholarly interest in digital adoption as a development lever aligned with the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

To organize this heterogeneous evidence, the researchers combined two established theoretical engines. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, in its consumer-focused UTAUT2 extension, explains adoption through performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions, while the Sustainable Livelihood Framework describes how households mobilize physical, social, financial, human, and natural capital to pursue livelihood strategies. Gender was modeled as a mediating factor, drawing on Naila Kabeer’s empowerment framework—resources, agency, and achievements—and on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, which highlights that benefits and burdens from technology are not distributed uniformly across populations. Together, these lenses allowed the review to connect the micro-level decision to buy a phone with macro-level outcomes such as income diversification and multidimensional poverty.

The headline finding is a starkly divided digital geography. As of 2023, only Africa and the Arab states still relied predominantly on 3G networks while other regions had moved to 4G and 5G. Africa has the lowest mobile phone adoption rate at 63%, meaning 37% of its population remains without a handset, followed by South America at 72%. Mobile internet penetration shows the same pattern: only about 37% of Africans use mobile internet, compared with 65% in South America, while fewer than 10% of Europeans lack access to either. Perhaps most telling is the gap between phone ownership and actual internet use—26 percentage points in Africa, versus 7 in South America and 9 in Asia—a divide the authors attribute to weak 4G and 5G infrastructure that keeps users tethered to basic phones and constitutes a second-level digital divide. Rural-urban disparities compound the problem: the ratio of urban to rural mobile internet use stands at 2.5 in Africa, 1.5 in the Asia-Pacific region, 1.22 in the Americas, and just 1.04 in Europe, meaning African rural users face the widest connectivity chasm in the Global South.

Gender emerges as one of the review’s most consequential threads. The gender gap in mobile ownership is 15% in South Asia, 13% in Africa excluding North Africa, and a strikingly low 1% in South America. In mobile internet use, South Asia narrowed its gender gap from 41% in 2017 to 31% in 2023, largely credited to initiatives in India improving women’s online access, while Sub-Saharan Africa’s gap barely budged, sliding only from 34% to 32% over the same period. The evidence goes deeper than statistics: married women show significantly lower adoption and use of mobile devices than married men, and women are more likely than men to depend on borrowing someone else’s phone to access information—a pattern the authors link to patriarchal control over resources and the confinement of women to unpaid household labor. Expanding women’s access, they argue, would rebalance household bargaining power, expand skills and social networks, and open employment pathways, making gender-sensitive digital inclusion a central poverty intervention rather than a peripheral concern.

Along agricultural value chains, the review documents how phones function as production and marketing infrastructure. In Tanzania’s pastoral communities, mobile phones facilitated communication vital for cattle farming; in South Africa, they gave smallholders access to extension advice, money transfers, pasture management tips, weather updates, and input application guidance; in China, farmers used mobile apps for farm management, market information, and extension training that boosted production and income. Yet intensity of use varies enormously between and within countries. Farmers in China, India, Kenya, and South Africa deploy advanced applications for production and marketing, while counterparts in Ethiopia and Peru primarily use phones for calls and messaging. Large-scale farmers consistently out-adopt smallholders in advanced applications, a gap the review attributes to digital skill deficits, affordability constraints, language barriers, and patchy network coverage. Intermediaries remain another bottleneck: rural African phone owners still depend heavily on middlemen who compress profit margins, whereas Asian e-commerce systems increasingly connect producers directly to consumers, and Latin American farmers have used phones to raise incomes by trimming transaction chains.

Financial inclusion is where Africa leads the world. Sub-Saharan Africa registers the highest mobile money adoption of any region, and the evidence reviewed shows measurable welfare consequences. In Kenya, digital financial services have improved rural poor livelihoods, raised per capita incomes, and lifted households out of poverty; classic research on Kenya’s mobile money revolution found it significantly enhanced households’ ability to share risk by slashing transaction costs, while other studies document its role in remittance flows across domestic and international borders. Comparative assessments rank mobile money as easier, safer, more trustworthy, more convenient, faster, and cheaper than traditional banking, and its reach into unbanked rural communities is credited with stimulating economic participation. By contrast, mobile money remains underutilized in Asia and especially South America, depriving marginal populations in infrastructure-poor areas of a proven tool—an asymmetry the review urges policymakers to correct through targeted promotion.

The poverty picture, however, is not uniformly rosy, and the review is candid about the reversals. Studies in selected Sub-Saharan African countries found that internet-enabled mobile phones were associated with increased poverty, and some economists argue that ICT-driven sectors reward skilled workers while trapping less-skilled laborers in low-paid jobs, deepening income inequality. Household budgets can suffer too, as communication expenditures divert money from food and necessities, and some research even links expanding phone coverage to increased violent conflict. On the livelihood side, phones open new economic opportunities, reduce risk exposure, lower transaction costs, and connect farmers to end users in India, South America, and beyond, but poor network coverage, unreliable electricity, low digital literacy, and constrained incomes blunt these gains, particularly in rural areas where over half of Africa’s population lives.

The authors’ conclusions amount to a policy agenda calibrated by region. For Sub-Saharan Africa, they prioritize expanding digital infrastructure, deepening mobile-based agricultural extension, building digital skills, and dismantling the affordability and gender barriers that keep women and smallholders offline. In South America, where empirical evidence remains thin and largely limited to English-language literature, they call for research and funding on mobile money and e-commerce adoption among women, low-income, and rural households. In Asia, attention should turn to gender-based and socioeconomic inequalities in access and to rural entrepreneurship. Across all three regions, they recommend regulatory support, targeted subsidies for underserved groups, digital platforms matched to local skill profiles, awareness campaigns, and electricity expansion. Their closing warning is stark: unless developing countries act decisively to close the mobile divide now, each new wave of technology will only widen the gap between individuals, businesses, countries, and continents.

Subject of Research: Mobile-based digital technology adoption, gender, livelihood diversification, and poverty reduction in the Global South

Article Title: Mobile-based digital technology adoption, gender, livelihood diversification, and poverty reduction in the Global South: a scoping review

Article References: Bule, D. L., Ntuli, H., Wale, E., & Nketiah, P. (2026). Mobile-based digital technology adoption, gender, livelihood diversification, and poverty reduction in the Global South: a scoping review. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 459. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01749-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01749-2

Keywords: mobile technology adoption, digital divide, Global South, poverty reduction, livelihood diversification, gender gap, mobile money, e-commerce, smallholder farmers, digital infrastructure, financial inclusion, scoping review

The central premise of the study is deceptively simple but consequential: cities do not function as islands. Labor markets, innovation networks, infrastructure systems, and digital services routinely spill over municipal borders, tying together core cities, suburbs, and smaller towns into integrated functional regions. If smart city performance—measured through indicators of digital infrastructure, technological innovation, human capital, and connected urban services—is produced within these wider regional systems, then assessments that stop at the city limit risk misreading both the sources and the consequences of urban smartness. The authors argue that regional scaling, the way performance changes with the size of a regional system, provides a crucial test of whether smart urban capabilities are driven by local assets or by broader structural dynamics.

To carry out this analysis, the research assembles regional-level data across European territories, combining indicators of smart urban development with measures of regional population, economic output, and spatial structure. The methodological logic draws on scaling analysis, an approach borrowed from complexity science that has previously been used to show how many socioeconomic outputs—from patents to wages to the incidence of certain social phenomena—tend to increase superlinearly with city size. Applied at the regional scale, the question becomes whether smart performance grows proportionally, sublinearly, or superlinearly as regions become larger and more densely connected, and whether that scaling behavior differs systematically across parts of Europe.

The study’s mapping of spatial distribution reveals a sharply uneven geography. Smart urban capabilities cluster in a limited set of regions, typically those anchored by large metropolitan areas with strong research institutions, dense producer-service sectors, and well-developed digital infrastructure. This pattern echoes long-standing observations about European spatial economics, including the persistence of a core-periphery gradient running roughly from the so-called blue banana of urbanization through southern Germany, the Low Countries, and parts of northern France, toward more sparsely provisioned peripheral regions in southern and eastern Europe. But the regional analysis adds an important nuance: proximity to a high-performing core does not automatically translate into high regional performance, and some regions without globally famous capitals nonetheless demonstrate robust smart urban profiles built on secondary cities and coordinated regional networks.

The scaling results carry particular significance for urban policy. When the researchers examine how smart performance varies with regional size, they find evidence that the relationship is not uniform across Europe. In some regional contexts, performance rises more than proportionally with size, consistent with agglomeration effects in which larger, denser regional systems generate disproportionate returns on digital and innovative activity. In others, the relationship flattens or weakens, suggesting diminishing returns or structural constraints—such as fragmented governance, uneven infrastructure investment, or dependency on a single urban core—that prevent large regions from converting size into smart performance. This heterogeneity undermines the idea that there is a single universal law of smart urban growth and instead points to regionally specific development regimes.

One of the study’s most provocative implications concerns the proliferation of smart city rankings and benchmarks. Municipal league tables, the authors suggest, can be misleading in two directions. A small city may appear exceptionally smart on a per-capita basis while depending heavily on regional universities, transport systems, and firms headquartered elsewhere; conversely, a sprawling polycentric region may look mediocre when judged by its largest municipality alone while its distributed network of towns collectively delivers strong digital and innovative capacity. By evaluating performance at the regional scale, the study provides a corrective that better reflects how the production of smart urban outcomes is actually organized in functional space.

The findings also speak to a central debate in regional science: the tension between concentration and dispersion of high-value activities. If smart capabilities reward agglomeration with superlinear returns, then market forces and even some policy interventions will tend to deepen regional inequality, funneling talent, investment, and infrastructure toward already advantaged metropolitan areas. The study’s evidence of heterogeneous scaling offers a more hopeful reading. Where regional systems—particularly polycentric ones with multiple cooperating cities—achieve strong performance, the lesson is that scale advantages are not the exclusive property of single dominant metropolises. Connectivity, complementarity, and coordinated governance among smaller cities can substitute, at least in part, for raw metropolitan size.

For European policymakers, the research lands at a moment when cohesion policy, digital transition funding, and smart city programs are being recalibrated. The European Union’s digital and green transitions explicitly target territorial balance, yet the study suggests that policy instruments designed around individual municipalities may systematically miss the regional systems in which smart performance is actually produced. Investment in broadband or innovation vouchers allocated city by city may underperform relative to instruments that reward inter-municipal cooperation, shared regional data platforms, and integrated transport-and-digital planning. The scaling evidence implies that the effectiveness of such interventions will differ by regional context, arguing for territorially differentiated strategies rather than one-size-fits-all smart city templates.

The study is candid about the limits of its evidence base. Regional indicators of smart urban performance remain imperfect proxies for the underlying phenomena they seek to capture, and data availability varies across countries, complicating pan-European comparison. Scaling relationships, moreover, are correlational: demonstrating that performance rises with regional size does not by itself identify the mechanisms—labor pooling, knowledge spillovers, infrastructure economies, or network effects—that drive the pattern. The authors call for finer-grained, longitudinal work that can trace how regional smart performance evolves over time and how specific policies alter scaling behavior. Still, the analysis marks a meaningful step in relocating the smart city debate from the showcase municipality to the regional systems in which urban intelligence is embedded.

In the end, the research reframes a familiar question with fresh analytical force. The smart city narrative promised that technology would make urban life more efficient, sustainable, and responsive; this study suggests that whether that promise is fulfilled depends less on any single city’s gadgetry than on the scale, structure, and connectivity of the regions those cities inhabit. As Europe confronts the twin challenges of digital transformation and territorial cohesion, the message is clear: the future of smart urbanism will be decided not city by city, but region by region, and policies that recognize this spatial reality are far more likely to deliver smartness that is both high-performing and broadly shared.

Subject of Research: Spatial distribution and regional scaling of smart city performance across European regions

Article Title: Beyond smart cities: spatial distribution and regional scaling performance in European regions

Article References: Dai, Y., Hasanefendic, S., & Bossink, B. (2026). Beyond smart cities: spatial distribution and regional scaling performance in European regions. npj Urban Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00474-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s42949-026-00474-2

Keywords: smart cities, European regions, urban scaling, regional development, urban sustainability, digital infrastructure, spatial distribution, agglomeration, territorial cohesion, polycentricity, regional policy, complexity science