THERE is a moment in every trade digitalisation working group that I have come to recognise. Someone presents a framework. Someone else presents a system. A third person presents a standard. And almost every time, no one asks: "But what about the smallholder in the Mekong Delta trying to sell her produce across the border?"
The question would land like a stone in still water.
The gap between the ambition of digital trade reform and the reality of who it reaches dominates my thinking. And it is what last year's UN Sustainable Development Goals report has made impossible to ignore.
Last year's SDG report is, in many ways, a document of genuine progress. Global maritime freight has reached 11.6bn metric tons. Developing countries now account for 54% of global maritime freight volumes, having overtaken developed economies in 2017. 5G now covers 51% of the global population. This is a remarkable expansion in just five years. Digital transformation is named as one of six priority action areas for the decade to 2030.
And yet the same report delivers a parallel verdict that the sector would do well to sit with. Progress has been fragile and unequal. Where 84% of people in high income countries now have 5G access, coverage in low-income nations sits at just 4%. Least developed countries and landlocked developing countries face specific barriers. These barriers are not just in connectivity, but in the financial inclusion, manufacturing capacity, and research investment that make digital infrastructure meaningful rather than merely present. The digital divide is not closing fast enough. And trade digitalisation, for all its promise, risks widening it further if we are not deliberate about who we are building for.
The Secretary-General's message is clear: we need to shift into overdrive.
This year's SDG Report, published just last month, shifts its lens from statistics to stories, showcasing how targeted interventions are transforming communities where the data previously showed only gaps. It is a welcome reminder that behind every number is a person. And that the most important question in trade digitalisation is not how fast the systems move, but whether the right people are moving with them.
This is not an abstract concern. It is a design question. This challenge is not confined to developing economies. Australia's own trade digitalisation agenda faces the same design question. Who is shaping these systems? And who will be left behind if the answer is 'the same people who always have been?
I have spent 25 years working in global trade, specialising in the digitalisation of trade across Australia and developing economies. I have sat in the rooms where the frameworks are written. I have also stood in the communities where those frameworks either land or don't. And the single most consistent observation I carry from that experience is this: the border is not where trade breaks down. The gap behind it is.
When we talk about digital trade, about electronic trade documents, verifiable credentials, tokenised titles, interoperable payment systems, we are describing infrastructure that is genuinely transformative. This is serious, consequential work.
But infrastructure is not impact. Infrastructure is potential. Impact is what happens when the right people are in the room when that infrastructure is designed. Last year's SDG Report identifies the groups most at risk of being left behind by digital transformation: women, people with disabilities, communities in low-income countries, smallholders and traders operating at the margins of formal trade systems. These are not peripheral beneficiaries of trade reform. In many of the economies I work in across South East Asia, they are the majority of the trading population. And they are consistently the last people invited into the working groups that shape the systems they will eventually have to use.
This is the holistic argument I have been making. Trade digitalisation that convenes government but not industry will produce policy without adoption. Trade digitalisation that convenes government and industry but not finance will produce systems without liquidity. Trade digitalisation that convenes all three but not the communities at the end of the supply chain will produce efficiency at scale and inequity at the margins. All these things are happening right now, in programs funded by well-intentioned donors, managed by well-resourced contractors, and implemented by well-meaning advisors who simply didn't put everyone at the table.
The SDG reports call for increased international cooperation and sustained investment. That is necessary but not sufficient. What is equally necessary is a more deliberate approach to who shapes the design of digital trade systems, not just who eventually uses them.
The question is simpler and harder at the same time: who is this for? Not in theory. In practice. At the border. Behind it. In the communities where the difference between a digitalised trade system and a paper one is the difference between a smallholder getting paid this week or next month.
The 2030 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals is five years away. Digital transformation is on the list. So is reducing inequality and so are decent work and economic growth. So are strong institutions. These are not separate goals. They are the same goal, approached from different angles. And trade digitalisation, done well, done inclusively, done with everyone at the table, is one of the most powerful levers we have for achieving all of them at once.
This is not a challenge exclusive to developing economies. Every trade digitalisation reform agenda, including our own, is only as strong as the breadth of voices that shape it. The border is not the problem. The gap behind it is. And closing that gap is, ultimately, the whole point.