The Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was hosted in a hybrid format by the Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh from 15 to 19 December 2024, under the overarching theme: Building Our Multistakeholder Digital Future. The IGF 2024 Outputs are available.
The 19th annual IGF meeting received a record number of 11,749 registered participants. At the IGF venue in Riyadh, 7,343 participants collected their badges and participated onsite in the meeting. Over 2,800 stakeholders participated online, making the total participation at the 19th annual IGF meeting over 10,143. The majority of onsite participants came from Saudi Arabia, United States of America, China, Brazil, Switzerland, Pakistan, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, Germany, Egypt, Kenya, Russia, The Netherlands, Belgium, France and India. Most of online participants connected from Saudi Arabia, United States of America, China, Germany and India.
64% participants indicated they were participating for the first time.
Gender representation was 69% male, 31% female and less than 1% self-identified as other.
About 2% of registered participants indicated they were members of parliaments from 27 different countries.
More than 1% of registered participants were press and media representatives. The biggest number of participants came from the Government (48%) and private sector (25%), followed by civil society (12%), the technical community (7%), intergovernmental organizations (7%) and press (1%).
In terms of regional diversity, the majority of participants came from Asia Pacific (50%), followed by members of the intergovernmental organizations (17%), WEOG (16%), Africa (11%), Eastern Europe (4%) and GRULAC (2%).
Below are the visual breakdowns of all participants per stakeholder group, region and gender.
Compared to IGF 2023, this year’s IGF saw an increase in representation of the participants coming from the Governments (+32%); and in representation of stakeholders from the African region (+3%). The number of stakeholders from GRULAC was lower than in 2023 (-5%).
Regarding participation by the level of development of the country, based on the latest available HDI Index, over 65% of all participants came from very high and high human development countries, while the rest came from the countries indexed by middle and low human development, as illustrated on the graph below.
The meeting’s livestream service attracted over 20,000 unique views. Over 70% of viewers were between 18 and 44 years of age. Livestreams were mostly viewed in Saudi Arabia (+49%), followed by the United States, China, Germany and India.
Week-of media monitoring showed that the IGF was covered in a very high number of major television outlets, including Asharq Bloomberg, Sky News Arabia, CNBC Arabia, Al-Ekhbariya and Saudi Channel, several print and online outlets such as Saudi Press Agency (SPA), Al-Madina, Okaz, Al-Jazirah, Sayidaty, Adwaa Al-Watan, Al-Rajol, and regional and international outlets Kuwait News Agency (KUNA), UN Sustainable Development Blog, Kurdistan24, GlobeNewswire, FinanzNachrichten, as well as outlets in Italy, Senegal and many more.
The meeting featured 307 sessions. Breakdowns per session type were: 1 Opening Session, 1 Opening Ceremony, 4 Main Sessions, 91 Workshops, 45 Open Forums, 11 Launches and Awards, 46 Lightning Talks, 11 Networking Sessions, 15 DC Sessions, 3 NRI Collaborative Sessions, 51 Pre-Events (Day 0 Sessions), 5 High-level Leaders Track, 9 Parliamentary Track Sessions, 1 Judiciary Engagement Session, 5 Business Engagement Sessions, 1 Global Youth Summit, 1 BPF Session, 3 PN Sessions, 1 Open Mic, and 1 Closing Ceremony.
Organizations from five different continents joined the IGF Village with 80 booths to share their work missions with the Forum’s participants. The Village included representatives from all key stakeholder groups: governments and intergovernmental organizations, private sector, civil society and technical community.
There were also 34 remote hubs organized around the world from 19 different countries: 50% in Africa; 17% from Asia Pacific; 17% in Latin America and the Caribbean; 5% in Eastern Europe and 11% in WEOG.
