BY BETELHEM BEDLU
Information and Communication Technology play a critical role in accelerating progress towards every one of the Sustainable Development Goals. Technology and digitalization can open new avenues to reduce poverty and hunger, develop more inclusive health systems, create new jobs, help mitigate climate change, improve energy efficiency, and make cities and communities more sustainable.
Digital platforms, e-commerce and digital financial services are all examples of innovative business models that create new pathways to support women in earning additional income, increasing their employment opportunities, and accessing wider knowledge and information.
In a speech delivered in relation to International Women’s Day, marked under the global theme of “DigitALL: Innovation and Technology for gender equality”, State Minister for Innovation and Technology, Huria Ali noted that the digital technology has made people’s life easier as well as enhanced the education, health, and other sectors.
Digital Ethiopia 2025, Ethiopia’s Digital Transformation Strategy, prioritizes developing an inclusive digital economy, as to her. Enhancing digital skills and knowledge has also been carried out as part of the major efforts geared towards building digital economy adding that various activities are underway to allow women acquire skills and knowledge in the digital sector.
Citing a given study, the State Minister highlighted that women are close to innovation, technology and digitalization. Thus, she stressed that if given equal opportunity, they will likely become technology innovators. Owing the fact that digital inclusion allows to serve all segments of the society, the government has attached great importance to the sector, as to her.
During the occasion, Catherine Sozi (PhD), UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator underlined the need to appreciate the considerable benefits digital technologies and connectivity can provide to rapid realization of sustainable goals. At the same time, she said it is important to recognize that across the world, millions of people are still unable to access the internet and participate online; and women are disproportionately excluded.
By the latest estimates from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a majority of women in the world have never used the internet. It estimates that, in 2019, 55% of men in the world had used the internet while only 48% of women had. In several parts of the world, the number of men online vastly outnumbers the number of women online. The ITU’s regional estimates for Africa put the gender ratio at nearly three-to-two in favor of men over women, as to her.
Various barriers prevent women and girls from accessing the internet and participating online, including unaffordable devices – the cheapest new smartphone cost 104 USD on average- and data tariffs, inequalities in education that lead to lower digital skills, social norms that discourage women and girls from being online, and fears around privacy, safety, and security.
Indeed, technology-facilitated gender-based violence is a key factor restricting the online activity of women and girls and inhibiting their access to the internet. It encompasses many forms, including intimate image abuse, doxing (the sharing of personal or identifying details), trolling (posting messages, images or videos and the creation of hashtags for the purpose of provoking or inciting violence against women and girls) and sharing of deepfake images. It also includes misogynistic or gendered hate speech as well as efforts to silence and discredit women online, including threats of offline violence.
According to her, online violence against women and girls, though not a new phenomenon, has escalated rapidly since the onset of COVID-19 with serious implications for women’s safety and well-being. It is a form of gender-based discrimination and a violation of human rights. But existing laws, policies and frameworks to prevent and respond to GBV have not kept pace with technological developments, and there are significant gaps in knowledge and evidence about how to prevent and eradicate it, she added.
While digital exclusion limits the opportunities for those women and girls unable to connect, it also has broader societal and economic impacts that affect everyone. With hundreds of millions fewer women able to use the internet, the world is missing out on untold social, cultural, and economic contributions that they could make if they were able to harness the internet’s benefits.
Reminding that the challenge is not only a gender issue; rather it is a sustainable development issue, she highlighted that governments throughout the world have failed women and girls in rising to the challenge to close the digital gender gap. However, this is not just a failing for women and girls: the costs of this exclusion are shared throughout society. There is an untold wealth of cultural, social, and scientific knowledge lost because of the exclusion of women’s and girls’ voices from the online world, she stressed.
Moreover, the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), which is a global coalition working to drive down the cost of internet access in low and middle-income countries through policy and regulatory reform, estimates that over the last decade, low and lower-middle income countries have lost a total of one trillion USD in gross domestic product (GDP) to the gender gap in internet use.
This will surpass 1.5 trillion USD by 2025 if these countries continue to fail to close the gender gap in internet connectivity. “When we fail to capitalize on the potential that gender parity in the digital economy can provide, we are not only failing those women and girls, but we are failing ourselves and creating more obstacles to realizing the SDGs,” she said.
Ethiopia’s digital transformation strategy, Digital Ethiopia 2025, recognizes that technological change has been the primary driver of social development and aims for all Ethiopians to benefit from and capitalize on the Fourth Industrial Revolution that digitalization has brought.
Still, in Ethiopia women face many challenges in making this a reality. As of 2021, women in Ethiopia continue to trail behind men in terms of fixed internet access, with 14% of women to that of 20% for male. Also, women’s disproportionate presence in the informal economy in the country means that the 61% of working women are excluded from the benefits that the formal economy can provide, such as funding, training and access to digital networks.
As a result, we run the risk of having this significant proportion of the economy miss out on the benefits of digitalization. Additionally, lack of women’s existing presence in the Ethiopian tech entrepreneurial ecosystem creates systems that routinely do not consider the unique and sometimes, negative, relationship between women and digital technology.
“Investing in women and girls is an investment in the future of all people in Ethiopia. Just as Ethiopia cannot be left behind in the digital revolution, there is no excuse for the women of Ethiopia to not reap equal benefits in the country’s digital transformation,” she underscored.
In doing so, she went on saying that we consider taking firm actions regarding digital literacy, affordability and accessibility, women’s leadership, among others. Addressing the issue of literacy, she said multidisciplinary education on navigating digital technologies and spaces with women and girls at the center is important to advance gender equality and remove harmful stereotypes. It is a must to break down the invisible barriers that keep women and girls offline, such as hidden biases that discourage them from pursuing science, engineering, technology, or math.
Similarly, as stakeholders working to support digital transformation, focusing on improving the digital infrastructure in the country to expand access and increase the affordability of digital technologies is vital. This is especially important for rural and low-income communities where the digital gender divide is even greater, as to her.
“It is not enough to secure women’s participation in the digital space. We must also encourage the agency and leadership of women in technology. It is important for us to increase the role and visibility of women as technology creators and decision-makers and include them equally in the design, development, and deployment of technology that is better able to meet the needs of the whole of society.”
In addition, she emphasized that stronger legislation with increased capacities and safeguards is needed to eliminate technology facilitated gender-based violence and to protect the rights of women and girls online.
“National laws and regulations should be revisited to ensure that digital human rights are taken as seriously as the rights we are afforded offline. We need to create safe and inclusive digital spaces with zero tolerance for online hate speech and gender-based violence and public and private sector entities that prioritize their prevention and elimination.” to walk in step with Ethiopia on its digital transformation journey and to ensure that women and girls are not left behind.
However, it is the collective responsibility of everyone to ensure that digital truly is for all and that we can achieve the goals set forth by Digital Ethiopia 2025 to create new opportunities and benefits for the country through digitalization down to the very individual. This is the Ethiopia we want, and the future envisioned in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Indeed, digitalization should be accessible to all people. It is important that we ensure that women and girls are not left behind on the opportunities and benefits that digital technology can provide while also highlighting the ways in which technology and innovation can advance gender equality.
“We must look at the many ways in which women and girls are uniquely impacted by digital technologies and understand that in this age of digitalization, innovation and technology can provide women and girls new and unprecedented opportunities to improve their lives,” she stressed.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD THURSDAY 20 APRIL 2023
