CAPACITY BUILDING IN ICT

Economic empowerment without capacity for project sustainability only yields short -term benefits. An integral part of the organization's activities will be capacity building through appropriate skill acquisition for the members of the women groups and associations. Training in leadership will be undertaken for women leaders of various groups.

Information and communications technologies (ICT) are becoming widely accepted as integral means for transforming the path of development. As envisaged in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the importance of harnessing information and communication technologies for poverty eradication cannot be overemphasized. Yet, as statistics describing the growing digital divide demonstrate, women and girls are at particular risk for exclusion from opportunities presented by ICT to secure better livelihoods and other rights.

The particular opportunities presented by ICT as means to foster women's economic security and rights in Africa, while being tested on a small scale in the region, remain largely untapped. Constraints of infrastructure, cost and content as well as gender biases in the use and development of ICT constitute significant barriers to use for most individual entrepreneurs or micro-enterprises. Indeed, as the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan emphasized in his message to the International Chamber of Commerce on October 30, 2002, "One key question for (you) to consider is to liberate the entrepreneurial energies of Africa's people, and how to promote foreign investment in African countries, in particular the least developed among them".

The 1995 Fourth World conference on women in Beijing has highlighted the power of information and communication technology (ICTs) as a tool that women could use for mobilization, information exchange and empowerment. Indeed, ICTs have the potential to assist poor women to increase their productivity and efficiency, building on their existing income-generating activities. ICT also present new employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for women to take part in the information economy.

In January 2002 in New York, UNIFEM launched its Digital Diaspora initiative (DDI) to build strategic partnerships between African IT entrepreneurs in the Diaspora and women's organizations and business associations in Africa. The initiative is aimed at harnessing the financial resources, IT and business expertise of Africans in the Diaspora to tackle the challenges of feminized poverty. It seeks to undertake projects that empower women economically through capacity building in the use of ICTs, identifying business opportunities, creating business partnerships, and providing access to finance as well as building the knowledge-base on ICTs for poverty alleviation.

The initiative is guided by a Global Advisory Committee (GAC) comprised of African ICT entrepreneurs from the Diaspora, ICT experts and representatives of the private sector and the UN system, and was launched in Africa through a multi-stakeholder meeting held in Uganda in May 2003. A comprehensive programme to address the gender digital divide in Africa has been prepared with advise from the GAC and will form the framework for action under the initiative.

The UNIFEM/UNDP DDI pilot project in Rwanda, funded through the Japan Women in Development Fund, intends to build upon the Government's commitment to ICT for development and to gender equality, as well as on the vibrant community of women's organizations and academic institutions. Its main objectives are:

· To build the capacity of Rwandese women's business oriented organizations in the use of ICT in the context of economic empowerment.
· To generate ICT-related training, employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for Rwandese women.
· To enhance Rwandese women's participation and influence in ICT policy formulation and implementation at the national level.