Millenium Development Goals (MDGs)

Lucy Niño and Lida Nuñez look at how the Colombian government has paid special attention to ICT policies, offering ICT literacy programmes and ICT inclusion in marginalised areas, while at the same time ICTs are used to promote prostitution and pornography produced in the country via the internet and cellphones. Government has produced a campaign to foster a “healthy use” of internet and to…

Jac SM Kee and Sonia Randhawa highlight forms of VAW that have received recognition in Malaysia and provide the context of ICT development and national policy objectives in this paper. It is not an exhaustive assessment of the current state of VAW, but rather aims to surface some of the interconnections between ICT issues and VAW and areas of potential opportunities for advocacy, as well as…

Two key debates are examined in the paper by Shereen Essof: censorship versus freedom of expression and privacy versus surveillance. She looks at the practices of VAW in a country with the world's highest reported rate of femicide and where there is little understanding of the strategic use of ICTs to support combating VAW as well as recognizing new avenues for perpetrating violence against women.

Aramanzan Madanda, Berna Ngolobe and Goretti Zavuga Amuriat look at how ICTs have been used to help provide spaces for women and sexual minorities. Sexual minorities have a presence on the internet to articulate concerns of members and raise awareness. Women’s mobile phone use is controlled by their husbands, who either give or withold permission to use and dictate when and how. Some women have…

The book is aimed at development practitioners and ICT innovators interested in inventive technology applications for social justice and development. It is a useful guide for positioning non-profit organisations to contribute effectively in meeting select MDGs and other development imperatives, through the use of ICTs.

In view of international focus on poverty reduction and the Millennium Development Goals, and the close connection of gender equality to achieving these Goals, the paper addresses women’s use of ICTs in the six areas identified in the MDG as critical to achieving poverty reduction, as well as the potential use of ICTs to promote gender equality in poverty reduction strategies. It analyses…

The emphasis on ICT as a tool of economic and social empowerment for underprivileged women raises new research questions that are relevant both for advocacy and project work by NGOs as well as for policy intervention by national and international bodies. The paper assesses women’s access to and use of ICTs for social empowerment and poverty reduction.

The paper is based on the premise that any strategies to increase the participation of women in the information economy will increase national IT capacity, reduce poverty, and help to raise the national standard of living. It summarises international discourse on the connections between gender equality and poverty reduction, and defines the context of the knowledge society, including the digital…

The publication points out that CEDAW, Beijing and the MDGs are mutually supporting processes and proposes ways on how to enhance the synergy among these processes to achieve gender equality.

The working document was presented at WSIS side events in Geneva in December 2003. The analysis is based on the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which includes the promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women.