Digitalisation in Southeast Europe | 2026 edition

Southeast Europe has built the on-ramps to digital life. Households are connected, classrooms are equipped and electronic health records exist. What the region has not built is the habit of using them – and that, rather than infrastructure, is where it still parts company with the EU.

SeeNext’s latest study – Digitalisation in Southeast Europe: Beyond Code For More Humanity – measures how far digitalisation has actually improved everyday life in Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, through the proprietary, EU-calibrated Human-Centered Digitisation Index (HCDI). The index:

• scores each country across four societal domains: Healthcare, Education, Services and the Workplace

• separates, within every domain, Access (the infrastructure), Usage (whether people engage with it) and Empowerment (whether it delivers real autonomy)

• weights three quarters of the score onto Usage and Empowerment, treating infrastructure as a prerequisite rather than an achievement

Key Findings:

The regional gap is behavioural, not physical. All three countries come within two points of the EU benchmark on Access, then fall away sharply. All three countries nearly match the EU on infrastructure, then lose half their score the moment the measure shifts to actual use.

Serbia leads with 64 points – but on an upside-down pyramid. The region’s best at turning digital tools into autonomy and its weakest at the foundations beneath them. Just 1.3% of Serbs have opened their own health record.

Bulgaria, 59 points: Europe-beating e-health, region-bottom workplaces. The only country above the EU benchmark for e-health availability — and the one where only 9.1% of firms train staff in digital skills.

Romania, 53 points: the region’s best-equipped classrooms, the EU’s emptiest e-government. 10.6 school computers per 10 students; 24.1% of citizens dealing with the state online.

Skills are the ceiling for all three. Roughly one in eight adults has above-basic digital skills, against nearly one in three across the EU.