Financing Broadband in Hard-to-Reach Communities

When floods hit West Virginia in February 2025, McDowell County put out a call asking residents to complete an online form detailing their property damage. For many residents, that wasn’t an option. Even in the best of times, 1 in 5 McDowell households have no internet. With floods damaging cell towers and broadband infrastructure, the problem became far worse. For McDowell, a once-thriving coal county, the lack of broadband made it harder to demonstrate its urgent need for recovery aid. Broadband has become essential to the survival of rural communities. Research shows that rural counties with high broadband adoption see 213 percent faster business growth and 44 percent higher GDP gains than those unconnected. The broadband gap is a solvable problem. The technology exists. What’s missing is the right financial structures to get investment where it’s needed most. Impact finance can be the bridge.

[Brian Vo is chief investment officer at Connect Humanity, where he leads efforts to finance community broadband. Clara Miller is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, president emerita of the Heron Foundation, which she headed from 2011 through 2017 and former CEO of Nonprofit Finance Fund, which she founded and ran from 1984 through 2010.]