State of the Digital Decade 2024 report

Recommendations to Member States to address these challenges:

• Prioritise investment in digital education and skills 
• Support early exposure of young people, particularly girls, to STEM and promote lifelong learning in the domain of ICT
• Prioritise the development of concrete use cases to support users and private and public service providers in the use of the EU digital identity wallet
• Take investment and regulatory measures to make secure and interoperable digital public services accessible to everyone, including older people and people with disabilities

For the first time, Member States submitted to the Commission national roadmaps, detailing their planned actions to reach the 2030 Digital Decade targets. 

The Commission published country-specific and cross-cutting recommendations for every EU Member State to address the identified shortcomings.

In general, the Commission recommends to all Member States to take action in:

Connectivity infrastructure: Ensure new players have sufficient access to spectrum for innovative business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) applications and encourage operators to speed up the deployment of stand-alone 5G core networks.

Cybersecurity: urgently implement the EU Toolbox for 5G Cybersecurity to ensure secure and resilient 5G networks. 

Sustainability: Support the take-up of digital solutions that reduce the carbon footprint across sectors (e.g. energy, transport, buildings and agriculture). Develop a methodology to assess the carbon footprint and enablement of digital infrastructures

Cloud: boost the uptake of new advanced cloud-edge solutions among SMEs by setting up strategies and activities to fully exploit the IPCEI-CIS, by leveraging the complementarity activities of the Cloud IPCEI Exploitation Office. 

Roadmaps: Pay greater attention to the challenges concerning the achievement of general objectives (i.e., human centred digital space, competitiveness, resilience, sovereignty, inclusiveness, sustainability and greening, coherence of the action) and on the necessary measures that should be taken, including as regards to the implementation of the Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles.

Member States have to review and adjust their national roadmaps before 2 December 2024. 

The European Union is contributing to financing the digital transformation through:

The Recovery and Resilience Fund 

EUR 150 billion 

DIGITAL Europe Programme

EUR 7.9 billion 

Connecting Europe Facility

EUR 1.7 billion 

Cohesion funds

EUR 31 billion