July 7, 2026
The Last Mile of Digital Inclusion Is Not Fiber
Brazil's PNAD survey shows internet access passing 90%, but kids age 10-13 were the only group that used it less in 2025, citing distrust.
There are still professionals repeating that only a minority of Brazil has internet access. That is no longer true. In 2025, for the first time, more than 90% of the population went online: 168.7 million people, according to IBGE. In 2016, that number was just 66%.
The gap that separated cities from rural areas, 37.5 percentage points, fell to 8.5. The culprit is the phone: among people who already use the internet, 98.7% access it through mobile, not fixed broadband.
Of the 17.7 million still offline, 44.9% say the reason is not knowing how to use it. Among older adults, that number rises to 66.5%. The signal already reaches nearly everywhere. What is missing is someone teaching people how to use what is already in their hand.
And here is a very interesting data point: children aged 10 to 13 were the only age group that used the internet less in 2025 than in 2024, with privacy and safety among the top reasons cited.
That decision was probably not made by the child alone: in a household survey, whoever answers on behalf of a twelve-year-old is usually an adult in the home, and the reason cited reflects a parent's read on the risk. That makes the data point more serious: a family decided to pull their kid off an app out of distrust, the same rational decision any adult makes when a product loses their trust. The difference is that the product team still reads that drop as lost engagement in the wrong age bracket, not as a trust alarm.
Closing this last gap will not require more signal reaching people, it will require a product that teaches itself how to be used, with a low learning curve, and that earns back the trust of whoever, rightly, decided to stop using it.