The Digital Ecosystem Country Assessment (DECA), a flagship initiative of the Digital Strategy, supports USAID Missions to better understand, work with, and support country digital ecosystems. The DECA looks at three pillars of a country’s digital ecosystem: (1) Digital Infrastructure and Adoption; (2) Digital Society, Rights, and Governance; and, (3) Digital Economy. The Peru DECA was carried out between July 2021 and February 2022. It included desk research, 63 key informant interviews, and 9 focus group discussions with USAID/Peru project participants, and was guided by USAID/Peru’s 2020-2025 Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS).
Peru’s digital ecosystem is one of many contrasts. While it was one of the first countries in Latin America to establish a permanent connection to the internet in the early 1990s, bringing connectivity to Peruvians in rural and Amazonian regions remains a challenge. Policy implementation capacity gaps and administration changes slow efforts to remedy digital divides and to ensure important safeguards are in place. Civil society organizations’ (CSOs) support for the protection of digital rights is fragmented and small-scale due to a lack of technical capacity and resources. While Peru was one of the first in the region to enact an electronic money law in 2013, the marketplaces for digital financial services, e-commerce, and digital talent are Lima-centric and dominated by commercial banks.
