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 Honduras DECA was carried out between March and November 2022. It included desk research, 76 interviews with stakeholders from civil society, academia, the private and public sectors, and international development organizations, and was guided by USAID Honduras' 2020–2025 Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS). Honduras was one of the last countries to offer mobile services in 1994. Since then, the uptake of digital technology has lagged compared to its Latin America and Caribbean neighbors. Connectivity remains a challenge with low levels of affordability, availability, and use, coupled with a lack of digital infrastructure. Policy implementation is slow, while capacity gaps and administration changes reduce efforts to close digital divides and protect citizens from digital harms.
Due to a lack of technical capacity and resources, civil society organizations' (CSOs) support for digital rights protection is fragmented. Meanwhile, the digital economy is hampered by poor connectivity, a challenging operating environment, a lack of trust, and minimal regulatory oversight. However, there is an opportunity for digital transformation with President Xiomara Castro’s new República Digital (Digital Republic) Plan for bridging the digital divide, the National Digital Agency for overseeing e-governance, and jumpstarting a burgeoning creative economy.