Gender and ICT Awards: promoting women's empowerment and gender equality

Tell the World You've Created a Difference

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We are pleased to announce that the PALLITATHYA HELPLINE has been selected as the winner of the Gender and ICT Awards for 2005!

Congratulations to PUTTING ICTS IN THE HANDS OF THE POOR, INDIA and EHOMEMAKERS, MALAYSIA Gender and ICT Awards for 2005 Runners Up!

Paddling in Circles While the Waters Rise:
Gender Issues in ICTs and Poverty Reduction by Angela M. Kuga Thas

The 2005 Gender and ICT Awards celebrated successful ICT initiatives focussed on poverty reduction. A media brief on the intersections between ICTs, gender and poverty reduction highlights the issues and provides recommendations.

APC WNSP AND GKP GENDER AND ICT AWARDS

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) play a growing role in the world's societies, and have the potential to help disadvantaged groups increase their participation in the civic, social, political, and economic processes critical to achieving change. However, women – particularly women in developing countries – don’t benefit from these new technologies, a reflection of the existing unequal power relations in societies as a whole. ICTs can be used to either exacerbate or transform unequal power relations. ICTs cannot create gender equality, or end poverty, but they can be tools for social action and positive social change.

In 2005, the Gender and ICT Awards focus was on empowerment, specifically ICT initiatives that promote women’s economic empowerment as it relates to development.

Rural women contact the Pallitathya Helpline

A Help-line, vocational CDs and eHomeworkers get thumbs up in Tunis

While negotiations on internet governance were taking place a few corridors down the hall on November 16, three projects received the honours of the 2005 Gender and ICT Awards. The 2005 GICT Awards focussed on information and communication technology initiatives which promote women's economic empowerment and development in the Asia-Pacific region.

Read about Gender and ICT Awards Winner and Runners Up at the World Summit on the Information Society.

A mobile operatar lady from the Pallitathya Helpline assists a rural family in Bangladesh. Rural community members can contact a database to ask for health or market requests via a cell phone and the mobile operator lady. Read about the 2005 Award winners!

The APC WNSP and GKP Gender and ICT Awards aim to honor and bring international recognition to innovative and effective projects by women to use ICTs for the promotion of gender equality and/or women’s empowerment.

Specifically, the Awards’ objectives are to:

Recognise gender and ICT initiatives globally and provide further impetus for others to mainstream gender in the field of ICTs for women's empowerment, and therefore support our advocacy work;
Provide a much-needed venue to recognise community-based or small-scale initiatives designed and implemented by women and women's organisations/networks; while providing recognition to larger scale but cost-effective multi-stakeholder initiatives;
Provide much needed opportunities to develop new collaborations/partnerships and opportunities for upscaling small-scale and community-based initiatives.
To increase the profile as well as knowledge and networking base of both APC WNSP and GKP in the area of gender and ICTs.