‘Life would have been harder, harder and more in chaos, if there wasn’t internet’: digital inclusion among newly arrived refugees in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic

Digital technologies are transforming almost every aspect of people’s lives, with COVID-19 accelerating this transition. For refugees, access and familiarity with these technologies is critical to wider aims of social integration. This article explores digital inclusion during the COVID-19 pandemic, using data from studies conducted in 2020 and 2021 with refugees recently resettled in Australia. Inclusion was mapped against three domains–access, affordability, and literacy–from the annual Australian Digital Inclusion Index. Our study found that many respondents reported comparatively high digital inclusion. However, certain characteristics, such as gender, age, presence of children and country of birth, correlated with lower levels of inclusion within some refugee sub-groups. Our research makes three contributions: it examines levels of digital inclusion among recently arrived refugees during COVID-19; it explores how these levels relate to social links and bonds; and it discusses sample differences according to gender, age, language group and type of digital inclusion.