A government can give an older person a phone and still leave the person outside the services that moved onto it. Uruguay’s Ibirapitá program, begun in 2015, makes that problem visible through its design. A December 2025 agreement between the social-development ministry and social-security bank describes devices, mobile data, workshops, and community participation as parts of one public policy. The agreement is evidence of institutional continuity, not proof that every older resident now navigates a digital service easily. The distinction matters because access is not a box that can be ticked at delivery.
The benefit page sets eligibility conditions tied to age, residence, income, benefit status, and whether someone remains in work. Those rules determine who receives a device or a plan. They also show the limits of a program aimed at low-income older adults: a person with a slightly different pension or work situation may still need training, but fall outside a particular entitlement. A social policy has to draw lines; a responsible account of it should identify those lines instead of describing technology as universally available.
Uruguay’s presidency reported that Ibirapitá had distributed hundreds of thousands of tablets and later tens of thousands of phones since its founding. The government count is a delivery measure, not a measure of independent use, social connection, or improved health. A retired person might use a device to contact a grandchild, make an appointment, or read the news; none of those benefits follows automatically from a shipment number. Workshops and community spaces exist because the problem is partly social. Someone needs a patient answer when an interface changes or a message looks suspicious.
The program also challenges the habit of dividing Latin American digital policy into children as “the future” and older adults as people left behind. Ibirapitá’s participants are part of the present public. They must deal with services, payments, family communication, and information whose design choices affect their autonomy now. Phones age, data plans change, and the language of an app may become harder to follow after an update. A durable policy must maintain help beyond the first tutorial and invite older users to report what does not work. Uruguay’s experiment is strongest when judged by that continuing obligation. The phone is a tool; the public commitment is the technology that keeps it usable. That commitment can be tested in small ways: whether a person can reach a human trainer, replace a damaged device, and learn a changed interface without shame or extra cost.