The UN Women is pleased to announce their support for 20 digital literacy clubs for women and girls in Kenya and South Africa in collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation. The clubs create a safe space for them to learn in an environment free from gender bias.
The women and girls experience to actively participate, lead and create on the web. So far the project is transforming the lives of 300 women and girls, and the next step will be to expand globally.
A joint initiative by UN Women, Technovation and Google, “Change is Made with Code”, launched at the Global Citizen Festival in New York in September 2016, is investing in closing the gender digital gap towards the achievement of the SDGs by training and encouraging teenage girls to code on social issues that they are passionate about. The initiative aims to impact 10,000 girls globally by 2018.
Improving access goes hand-in-hand with enabling policies that advance the rights of women and girls in ICT to close the gender digital gap. The first Africa Summit on Women and Girls in Technology in Accra, Ghana, from 13 – 14 September, co-organized by UN Women and partners, launched national report cards based on a scorecard toolkit that assesses how countries are measuring up on their gender and ICT policies. Tracking tools such as this are an important source of gender data that powers evidence-based policy making to advance gender equality.
Ultimately, closing the digital gender gap brings real improvements in the lives of women and girls, and their contributions to their communities. “The ICT sector combines creativity and logic. And with these tools, the world has no limits—you can do anything just with some lines of code,” says Ileana Crudu, the young GirlsGoIT Ambassador from Moldova.
Source: UN Women