The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> RISPER AROSE: Hello, everyone. A warm welcome to this discussion. To our online audience, good morning, good evening, good afternoon from wherever you are joining us today.
It's been an exciting week, participating in the Internet Governance Forum 2025 in Norway.
My name is Risper Arose. We work toward expanding access to connectivity and digital opportunities.
We are honored for this opportunity and a platform to bring our voices to this stage.
Today, I have the privilege of moderating our discussion on a topic that really lies at the heart of digital inclusion, gender mainstreaming, and connectivity strategies.
Many of you, if not all of you, are aware that we have 2.6 billion people that are still offline. That's a huge number. That's a big challenge. As we know, digital connectivity is no longer a luxury. It's really critical in socio‑economic situations.
To close this gap, women continue to face significant barriers in accessing financial, educational, social, and health resources in this digital age.
While some governments have introduced policies to bridge this divide, there remains to be limits and absence.
According to different frameworks such as according to the ITU, gender is explicitly in only half of national ICT policies or master plans, and the frameworks such as WSIS+20, the Global Digital Compact, and sustainable development goal number 5 collectively advocate for infrastructure and digital rights.
However, millions of women and girls will remain excluded from the benefits of the digital economy.
So this session will explore how global commitments can translate into local actions by implementing gender‑responsive policies and recommendations in the different frameworks and look into how to mainstream gender and digital connectivity strategies.
I'm thrilled to have a distinguished panel of expert and practitioners with me, with us today, both here in person as well as online.
Three are joining online. I will begin with the ones we have here.
So I will start with Josephine Miliza, who is here and works for the Association of Progress Communication as the Global Policy Coordinator.
She will be really giving us insights from a civil society perspective on what it takes to integrate mainstream gender in connectivity strategies.
We also have Lillian Chamorro who is part of supporting community‑centred activity in the Latin America region. And we'll also be really sharing from her experience working with this community‑centred connectivity, what it means to support women and ensure that this gender‑inclusion in grass roots‑centred community connectivity issues.
Previously, she has served in other capacity as Deputy Director for the Universal Service Fund and the manager for Strategy, Development, and Fund Mobilization Manager. She'll be sharing a lot from a regulatory perspective on this topic.
Then we have Waqas Hassan, who is a representative from the Global Digital Compact. He spearheads the policy and engagement for the global inclusion project in Asia. He has a strong background in inclusive policy development, especially the gender ‑‑ programme and has implemented connectivity and community empowerment projects with a particular focus on underserved areas.
Then we have Ivy Tuffuor Hoetu, who is the Senior Manager Administrator working with the National Communication Authority in Ghana. For this specific meeting, she will be representing in her own capacity. She has considerable experience in digital connectivity, Internet development, and ICT training and has been responsible for ‑‑ bands and enforcing authorisation conditions.
Last but not least, we have ‑‑ Mohan who works at the intersection of digital governance and ‑‑ and leads programmes in artificial intelligence and data where she designs global capacity building initiatives on artificial intelligence and data governance across 80 countries.
She is working now with self‑employed women in India where she lives a centralised livelihood and upscaling programme for women in the economy.
That's the line‑up of speakers.
I would like to get right into the session.
Now, welcome Ms. Mohan (phonetic) to give us information on integrating gender and policy regulation guidelines for community‑centered modeled.
Please, you can have the floor.
>> MOHAN: Thank you to the Internet Governance Forum for an opportunity to be part of this discussion. My name is Maathangi Mohan.
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>> MAATHANGI MOHAN: These operate in places where large telecom companies don't see a lot of value. What makes them powerful is coverage gaps, but they're mostly corporate driven because of ‑‑ spirit and also they are nonprofit. That allow communities to control and own their own infrastructure, deciding who it benefits.
Local businesses can be supported. They can strengthen health care system and even provide emergency communications when most national systems fail.
They can adapt very quickly and responsibly in ways that traditional Internet Service Providers cannot.
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>> MAATHANGI MOHAN: It does not mean that everyone in the community is equally represented. Women and low‑income context are underrepresented. They're most often underpaid or unpaid because they contribute operations but at the same time, they are underserved when it comes to the infrastructure design itself.
Just for the scope of this report, we look very closely at Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa because each of these countries represent a different point.
In Kenya, community network license was introduced four years ago, in 2021, and the country also has a very mature national gender policy not just on digital inclusion, basically. So that’s definitely a policy movement. But when it came to ‑‑ specifically, what was going on is gender was not a concern because access and inclusion were a concern. Women were not included on the governance model.
By contrast, if you took Nigeria ‑‑ is not recognised, even by policy. That makes things difficult because they are not recognised in the first place. South Africa, licensing is currently under review. Gender has not been systematically considered in the process.
So even in the most progressive context, gender is treated adjacent, something to be mentioned later or something to be included later or it's mostly left to the civil society rather than embedding it in the report itself.
We try to ask why this gap exists. We used a simple framework to understand the opportunity and the motivation.
What came up is the policymakers often don't have the data. They don't have the information. They don't have the training or the frameworks to understand how gender shows up in connectivity and why it should show up in the connectivity. A lot of times, shockingly ‑‑ but also not ‑‑ a lot of them are not aware of what community networks are.
It comes to the next question. How do we design for inclusion in the community networks. First of all, we need to understand what they are.
Second, about opportunity, even when they are motivated, what is the direction? They don't always know what is in their power, where it has to change, where gender even fits when it comes to customising, funding, public consultations. Where does opportunity exist?
Thirdly, about motivation, very unfortunately, gender is still seen as a soft issue. It's not something that sits at the core when you think of Internet governance. It's an optional layer, like we saw earlier.
So using the three‑part framework, we have tried and understood what kind of recommendations will work for the ministries. Not to assign blame but more in how do we offer a more realistic and constructive way forward.
When we try to understand what inclusion looks like in South Africa, one of the most well‑known is the ‑‑ network in the Eastern Cape, and the population is mostly women. 70% are women. When you look at those who attend the decision‑making, it's still mostly men. Like 70% of the meetings and decisions are by men.
Women are opening the charging stations, collecting the fee, maintaining the equipment, but ‑‑ but because of social norms, it makes it unsafe or uncomfortable for them to speak up.
I've seen something similar in my work in India where women would show up and participate in digital training, in accessing eCommerce platforms, but they didn't control the financing, or they had to seek permission to attend. Things are not going to happen automatically. It's by systemic interventions that are required. To get to the most point part, while there's a suite of policy recommendations, I would like to highlight a few examples because we have tried to approach from it how do we tailor things for each ministry involved because we wanted to adopt a whole‑of‑government approach as well.
One would be for the ministries of ICT ‑‑ in these countries and beyond ‑‑ should require an assessment during the licensing process itself or some kind of incentive for women‑led ‑‑ and they can design ‑‑
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>> MAATHANGI MOHAN: For women to access the roles in these networks.
When it comes to the gender, they can introduce ‑‑ for women and fund women‑only training spaces when it comes to community networks or access cooperators.
Also, campaign against offline gender ‑‑ ministries can offer subsidies for low‑income women, consider providing tax breaks with a strong gender inclusion or women‑led ‑‑ and finally for ministries to mandate that programmes include a minimum ‑‑ of women so that they end up funding digital literacy for women in underconnected areas through the CN hubs itself.
While this is not an exhaustive list, I just wanted to share some highlights.
Through this, we hope we don't see gender as a check box but more integrated in the design principles itself.
To close, I would like to ‑‑ that we often want to say that we want to bridge the digital divide, but if we don't address or consider the gender digital divide, then we're not really closing the gap but building the infrastructure on top of the marginalisation that's already existing.
And community networks give us an opportunity to do things differently and make things right, and we definitely need to take the opportunity and design for it and regulate in it and design.
With that, I want to say thank you, and I look forward to the discussion as well.
>> RISPER AROSE: Thank you. Thank you so much, Ms. Maathangi for really giving us a grounding on what community networks are and what community networks bring towards bridging the digital divide as well as speaking to the challenges that exist with regard to thinking of connectivity. Thinking about connectivity, having gender not as an afterthought but thinking through it as the conception stage and design stage.
As you've correctly said, this is the opportunity that community networks bring in connectivity strategies.
Now this really gives us a good segue to the next speaker who will touch on some of the challenges that women face when trying to build and sustain this community network infrastructure.
Lillian, who has not only worked with community networks but also supported the ecosystem, will share her experience on what are some of the specific challenges that women face when trying to build this infrastructure, this community‑centred infrastructure.
>> LILLIAN CHAMORRO: Thank you for the opportunity to participate and also for the question.
From the experience of these initiatives, we can list some of the challenges for women. One of them is the work that women must assume. It makes it difficult for them to participate in the different activities involved in the implementation and also the maintenance of the network.
Often, they must assume a double‑working day when this care work falls almost exclusively on women.
Women in rural areas have low self‑confidence as they do not feel capable of appropriating technologies and no access to the technological knowledge. So they prefer to stay away from the processes, or they feel shamed to be present in these kind of processes.
There are some stereotypes in the community and women themselves to participate in technological processes.
Roles associated with the low ability of women in technology are normalised but also around the low participation in decision‑making and leadership.
All these result in more difficult to be part of technical processes. In many occasions, it's difficult to leave the home and participate in these kind of spaces.
Finally, I can mention lower access to technological devices. Their expenses are ‑‑ they're not tools ‑‑ assume those tasks.
>> RISPER AROSE: Thank you so much, Lillian, for sharing some of the challenges that women face when trying to build and sustain connectivity infrastructure.
Being just working for the network, I can totally relate to these challenges, starting from the low confidence level. It takes a lot because community‑centred connectivity is very technical. There has to be some encouragement, technical training, mentorship to even get women coming in to support the network infrastructure of the connectivity of the community.
This really helps to frame the challenge of this discussion today. What I would like to hear from this next speaker, Waqas, who is joining us online, what about gender is still missing from connectivity strategies? Why do we still have a huge gender gap within the different connectivities strategies?
Over to you, Waqas.
>> WAQAS HASSAN: Thank you. Thank you. I hope I'm audible.
So I think what you just asked was covered by Maathangi.
If you see it from a holistic the level, there are things dependent on a geographic profile and things like that.
There are things I have observed from the government. Two of them stand out for me, which I would like to share with all of you.
The first one is the connectivity strategies are primarily developed from an infrastructure mindset. And that mindset is based on the assumption that if you provide access and coverage expansion, that is synonymous with inclusion.
If it's broadband or whatever the means, there's now an equal opportunity for men and women to use.
I think what they need to realise is irrespective of how many technology and innovation we think about, infrastructure development does not mean ‑‑ there's scale and online safety and security. These are the challenges structured in inequalities that women face throughout the whole ecosystem that prevent them from using the Internet, despite having access.
So this is the first thing I observed.
Having the change in mindset, we look at it as a means. It's a means to an end, but it's different from what access can provide to the community.
Secondly, I think this digital gender empowerment is still considered as a social issue that requires a cost to be solved. But it is never just a social issue. It's a socio‑economic issue. There's undeniable evidence around that.
It proves that the women in developing countries has cost about $1 trillion in loss of GDP over the last decade. If it continues, another $500 billion will be lost over the next five years.
I think this advocacy ‑‑ we also pursue it's not just women empowerment as a social issue. It's actually an economic crisis that we want to work through, all of us together.
So I think I will just end with saying this is the realisation that needs to be propagated through our interactions with the government. They have to do more than just mention it. Like the IP policies and broadband policies, there's things mentioned but never the essence of those policies.
So I will stop there. Looking forward to the discussion.
>> RISPER AROSE: Thank you so much, Waqas. Thank you for bringing in such heaviness on the consequences or the losses that we are faced with when we're not inclusive in our strategies when an agenda is left behind. Connectivity strategies, it means not only social loss, but it goes to even economic loss at the global ‑‑ from a global perspective. With that in mind, I want to move to the next speakers who are the regulators, Dr. Emma from Kenya and Mrs. Ivy from Ghana. Why is it important to integrate gender in digital connectivity strategies?
And building on what Waqas has just mentioned, what are some of the losses we are having because of the gender gap? What do you think is at stake if we don't mainstream gender in these digital connectivity strategies?
I will start with Emma and then move to Ivy.
>> EMMA OTIENO: My simple answer would be that we have contracted both at the international level and national levels and agreed generally that we will not leave anyone behind. We say that because we want the world connected to the last person who is in a cave or if there's another one under the sea, they must all be connected.
For me, when I see the national level, that's the mantra, leave no one behind.
At the International Telecommunications Union, the WSIS, any place where the subject of digital transformation is being pursued, the agenda has been leaving no one behind.
When you come with the eye of a regulator ‑‑ why it exists is to allow the government to achieve the sustainable development goals.
So that, leaving no one behind, it's very critical for the government's socio‑economic development. We must pursue goals and regulations that will ensure we're meeting 100%.
Right now, when we look at statistics, in terms of coverage or how we're reaching out to people, we have now degrees of connectivity that is a coverage gap.
And we have the usage gap, which is becoming a bigger menace.
For all these categories, women seem to be more impacted. The fact that women are still left behind seem to be what is causing us not to achieve the bigger objective.
Kenya, coverage, you have the last 3%, which is mostly in the rural and the underserved area, it's where most of the women reside.
One of the things I must mention here is to bring onboard this conversation about having community‑centred networks is going to help us. I address the issue of why we must ensure that the why is addressed.
That's the prioritisations of licensing community networks, and we're going out to support women to address the issue of why.
The SDGs will not be met and that's not meeting the socio‑economic agenda.
I will give a chance to my other colleague.
Thank you.
>> RISPER AROSE: Thank you so much, Dr. Emma.
Over to you, Ivy.
>> IVY TUFFUOR HOETU: Yes. Thank you. Am I audible?
>> RISPER AROSE: Yes, we can hear you.
>> IVY TUFFUOR HOETU: Good morning from my location.
So one of the blind spots I will touch on is most of the time, we perceive technology as gender‑neutral and technology will benefit everyone equally.
But we have diverse needs. One thing we are lacking is our blind spots are in ‑‑ most of the time, the focus has been on connectivity metrics without disaggregating data or considering how there's translation of digital disparities.
This is largely due to disaggregated data related to online experiences.
In countries, how do we desegregate this data? Agenda, I'm talking about going beyond women. The agenda definition cuts across children, the elderly, and women, which most of these people are mostly underrepresented. Policies or regulations usually do not reflect their specific needs. The data we collect and gather, we gather then holistically without disaggregated them. So it's difficult to identify these specific needs. So this is one of the blind spots that we are lacking. I believe if it's addressed holistically, it can be addressed and target the needs of all these specific genders.
Most of the time, yes, it's women, but, also, even the elderly, inclusivity is connecting everyone everywhere.
How can you reach out to these people if you don't understand their specific needs? My height, I am short. Someone is shorter on someone is taller, you cannot give us the same level of entry to climb or something. One of them will need a ladder to be able to climb the tree.
We need to disaggregate the data we collect. Make specific indicators based on the specific gender needs, and I believe it will address these blind spots.
Thank you.
>> RISPER AROSE: Thank you so much.
Thank you for bringing in the regulatory issue to this conversation.
We've talked about the challenges and the problems, the gaps that exist and what is at stake.
Before we move to some of the solutions, I would like to see if there's any question or any comment online or in person.
If you have any question, you can just move to the roundtable. We can take it.
Yes, we can have that question and then move to the next segment.
>> I'm from Ghana IGF.
There's something organic, in terms of what you're talking about with community network. Speaking of collaboration and being able to provide solutions to the problem.
One of the things that I always see has been helpful in some of this is more about what I will call our community businesses. Again, this is gender‑based or women‑led, especially in Africa. I don't know about Lillian's experience in Latin America and the rest.
And what you would find ‑‑ I think there was a report about a year or two ago from Mastercard Foundation that found that most businesses in Africa are run by women, small to medium enterprises.
I don't know how the conversation is going to be, but, one, what I like to call synthesising or having organic technologies or solutions, in terms of connectivity where you would see that most of our local businesses are small or medium enterprises. They're small businesses. But how do we get them digital?
We're doing community work about important digital skills. I always give this keynote. Coming from Africa, we're multilingual, and most of the things we do needs to be owned by the people who can speak their own language or interpret it.
My point is this, the skills and things we do, we need to be able to translate into our local languages.
I'm giving this for free. I've been doing this for five years.
Let's try and translate things into the local languages, and the best people to be able to do that are language teachers or retired language teachers. That's inclusivity and gender.
Our medium‑sized businesses, get them the skills and get them business experience and create that business environment which gives opportunities to give value to our connectivity.
You will be surprised that you probably get financing for these local businesses.
So that's what I would like to contribute.
Thank you.
>> RISPER AROSE: Thank you so much for that contribution.
I believe it was just to add to the conversation that the speakers have shared. Absolutely agree that it should go beyond just the gender but also look at languages. Look at age, also. How can different age levels contribute to the digital connectivity for different communities?
This will now take us to the next question. I don't know if there's any question online?
>> EL KHOURY CYNTHIA: There's no question. Just a comment from Peter Balaba. He says: I do support the establishment of Community Networks approach in Kenya. However, collaboration with Community Libraries and Information centers can help to bridge the gaps.
In Nakaseke Telecentre and Library we are now focusing on empowering the Youth and Women in Digital Skills and we train them in the Local language to enable them understand the basics.
So it's just a comment and not a question.
Thank you, Peter.
>> RISPER AROSE: Thank you, Peter.
Thank you, Justine.
We'll be looking at what it takes to ‑‑ the gender‑inclusive connectivity.
I would like to go to the first speaker that gave us the presentation, Ms. Maathangi and Lillian. If you can, talk about how to best support women‑led connectivity models. You've already mentioned what are some of the challenges and barriers for women to participate in community‑centred connectivity models. Now what are some of the actions to be taken?
Maathangi, you can talk about some of the recommendations that came out of the research that you just presented.
I will start with Maathangi, and then we can go to Lillian.
>> MAATHANGI MOHAN: While talking about the report, I would like to share what I've seen in practice. While working with some of the Self‑employed Women's Association here in India, I've seen where we've supported some of these access digital markets during the first and second waves of the pandemic.
And then what happened is addressing the connectivity gaps in several clusters of villages, there was small hotspot system ‑‑
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>> MAATHANGI MOHAN: The catch was it was sustainable only because it was under an umbrella where they could step in to subsidise the hardware. Like one of our audience members pointed out, they coordinated all the training in their local language and did the work in existing self‑help groups.
The finding that came out was very similar to what we also studied in the report. If you remove that scaffolding, the model would not have survived. It would not have been sustainable.
So quickly summarising three recommendations would be, three, the licensing frameworks for these CDNs need to accommodate non‑registered collectives, informal women's groups. It's been pointed out that the SMEs, they're mainly owned by women.
So supporting a more ‑‑ women's group that is also equally important because these are mostly cooperatives ‑‑ solidarity. It's also going to exclude a lot of groups.
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>> MAATHANGI MOHAN: Secondly, there are a lot of already funded mechanisms, but one key insight is that the funds should also allow for experimentation and allowing failure and ‑‑ to figure out what works and what does not work.
These community networks are not going to scale, if you take a start‑up timeline.
Third, this is not going to be social inclusion or women's empowerment work, but it's going to be socio‑economic and infrastructure work as well. It's time that we recognise that.
This could mean stipend to local women managing ‑‑ and doing all the ground level operations and recognising the digital caretaking that entails as a form of labour. Also, not leaving out individual champions when we look at the community networks, recognising who is anchoring these and who is pulling these together.
So it's not just going to be what they are doing well or just that the access is there but go beyond it. These are the three recommendations I would like to add.
>> RISPER AROSE: Thank you so much.
Lillian, anything you would like to add?
>> LILLIAN CHAMORRO: I have a few actions that we think could improve participation.
One of them is establish financing funds, both for technology and also for training with special conditions for women's participation. For example, in closing the gaps in the basic use of technology devices and technological literacy, facilitate access to devices.
Also, adapting methodologies that transcend the technical approach for the community networks and consider women needs in support of the community.
This diversification of roles in communicative areas promote the promotion of women with support. Also, men should be involved in the administrative and financial aspects of sustainability.
Also support the participation of women in leadership roles in the communities without neglecting the recognition of the importance of the care work. It's important to recognise the importance. Sometimes the women, in our case, when we were working on the establishment of networks and antennas, those kinds of things, many women are working on the food, working on the care of the people ‑‑ and this work is not recognised. We need to recognise that.
Promote the participation of women in inclusion spaces. Make the fields visible so they can serve as reference for other women in traditional masculinised scenarios.
Reflect on care and how to approach it, recognising its value and establishing a mechanism for its distribution.
There should be a responsibility of communities.
If it is necessary, there should be allocation within the spending for the care of these people.
Create women circles to express their conditions, opportunities, difficulties not only about technology but about the participation in the life of the community.
In any case, the actions should be respectful of the environment and the values of the community since we often find ourselves in communities with very different visions of gender roles, and we are not looking to break but to seek spaces for dialogue and the importance of inequalities faced by women and other population.
Finally, conversations on gender must be strengthened in the entities and organisations. Both in men and women, if these reflections have not been integrated in our own work, it will be difficult to integrate them in the processes of combining the communities and spaces that are generated from there.
>> RISPER AROSE: Thank you so much, Lillian.
What I like about the recommendations that you have brought in is it's coming from working at the community level, and you know what the challenges are and what best practice can be adopted by community‑centred connectivity strategies at the grass roots.
And that really feeds in very well with what Maathangi has just presented, coming from a research report that she conducted in different countries within Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
Together, these are really strong actions that can be taken to support the sustainability of women‑led connectivity models.
Now I want to go back to you, Waqas. When we are talking about gender mainstreaming and digital connectivity, Pakistan is one of the few countries with adjudicated agenda strategy for gender inclusion. Can you share with us how that strategy has been developed? What is the impact of such a policy? What lessons can we learn ‑‑
>> WAQAS HASSAN: It's a topic close to my heart. When I was working with the ‑‑ Authority, we started doing something around it. That was basically the start of it. Just reporting, putting this into context, Pakistan had one of the highest gender gaps in the world, according to the Mobile Gender Gap Report. And this gap was persistently stuck at 38% for about two years.
So we had this discussion and doing something about it. There was this team that responded in a committee. GDPR at the time was one of the key supporters of the strategy development process, along with some of the partners.
So what was done was they adopted a collaborative and evidence‑based process that involved all of the multistakeholders that were somehow engaged with this issue.
So following that all‑inclusive process you talk about, there were workshops and interviews. There was a public perception. There was around 100,000 respondents using ‑‑ in all of this that was put into context, this strategy was being developed. It shaped up into the form of a strategy where, at the top level, there's a high‑level training committee, which consists of institution heads and led by the minister. Under that are six working groups. Research and data, digital literacy and inclusion ‑‑ reach of the group has its own chair, by the way, and the implementation body is ‑‑ and now there's coordinators for the strategy team. With this pool of framework you can see, you can see there's ‑‑ that was adopted. For the implementation, it's a role of society. All the working groups have representation from the public and private sector, civil society, from national log organisations. You name it, and you will probably find a body in one of the working groups contributing to one of the working groups.
One unique feature about this strategy is the working group on access, it is mentioned in the strategy as one of the few ‑‑ of the working group. It will draft policies around community networks, and it also mandates networks across Pakistan.
It's reduced from 38% to 25%. This is the largest of any countries, which are basically the developing countries.
In terms of lessons for my policymakers out there, we would recommend to follow the inclusive process and make sure all the stakeholders are onboard, if you want to develop this kind of strategy. As, talk the best use of other use cases. A lot of organisations are also working in this space, including ourselves, including APC and GSMA and others.
This is an example from a developing country, a region with the widest gender gap in the world.
>> RISPER AROSE: Thank you so much, Waqas, for those great points. Really, it's good to know that this can be done, and it has been done from Pakistan. Also, thank you for sharing some of the things that we can be thinking of when thinking about a strategy for digital inclusion.
Now I want to go back to Dr. Emma and Ms. Ivy, who are online as well.
If you could, propose one policy practice or shift to include integration and gender inclusivity and why?
>> EL KHOURY CYNTHIA: Thank you for what was provided, which links well to what I will provide as an answer. I like the Pakistan example and the way they've gone ahead.
One thing we can do as a policy or initiative to make this work better.
I lo go back to the statement that Maathangi gave regarding having an initial gender policy. But we've had the policy, and it's been there for years. It speaks about inclusivity as much as gender.
Why are we looking at the report. We're still at 39% gender gap. We're at where Pakistan was years ago.
Because of something we're not doing ‑‑ and that's going to be the answer to your question, Risper. We are putting things in related to the social compliance aspects but not meaningfully and intentionally putting them.
After we have also ticked the box of we have a policy, a framework a guideline. What is left is measurement, the meaningful tracking measure, we can see what are the outputs of this policy. What is the outcome? What is the impact? How can we sustain, improve?
When you ask anyone in the area of policy or regulation or in any of this space, we don't have that information.
Ivy said it well. What is the pain point? How do we move from here to the next state?
For me, having frameworks, most African countries are doing well because we're really working with having those policies, but meaningfully measuring them and looking at them as contributors to socio‑economic development is what has been lacking.
So two summaries that answer what is it. We must start the implement things like the designs, in terms of intentionally measuring, tracking, impact, and feeding back through so we can ensure you're going back to closing the gaps and leaving no one behind.
There's also the aspect of how can this be supported?
We cannot do this alone. We must bring onboard the financials. We must bring onboard the people that are volunteering to translate to local languages.
Those partnerships become the best of ensuring that we are making the progress in this regard.
Two things, measurement and collaboration and partnership so that we achieve these aspects.
Thank you very much.
>> RISPER AROSE: Thank you. Well said on the two critical aspects that we could be in cognizant of while thinking about gender mainstreaming.
I would like to hand it over to Ms. Ivy.
>> IVY TUFFUOR HOETU: Thank you. Picking up, true, we need the metrics, and we need the data. Also, the blind spot I mentioned earlier, the first thing starts from here, from the IGF here. We need to move or go with cross‑sector collaboration. For the past five years, more collaboration has increased. I believe we can do better to address this gender‑specific needs. Different regulators operate in silos with ministries responsible for gender, education, health, sociodevelopment. This fragmentation prevents holistic approach to digital inclusion.
It should shift from one specific ministry to handle digital connectivity. At least we have now known sectors. Governments know that ICT has become an enabler to all sectors. So we cannot sit and make ICT decisions without these sectors.
So we need all of them.
What IGF has done in recent past is inform members of Parliament who are key lawmakers.
We need to create platforms, finance ministries, et cetera, to also come to the IGF. Come to the table. Closely involve them. Once they sit at the table and understand the issues ‑‑ when they are formulating their sector‑specific policies, they will have ‑‑ what we usually have is an infrastructure fund. It's usually created by a mobile network, the ICT sector. But ICT goes just beyond the communication and ministry and regulators. It's affecting every sector.
So if a fund is ‑‑ the contribution shouldn't just be on the limited few operators. The contribution should come from each of these sectors who are benefitting from ICT. This can help to promote community networks.
One other thing we can do in formatting ICT policies is that stakeholder engagement. The framework that's been developed for years is the lack of implementation.
Yes, they may have been prepared and drafted without consultation, but it's not too late. As we leave from here, we should involve all ‑‑ especially women‑focused activists. Gender advocates, consumer advocates.
When we plan, we need to involve them. They represent a specific focus group. When we understand their basic needs, that's when we can formulate these policies, target to target, and address specifically. We're addressing their specific needs. When we do that, we get to know their issues. That's a constant.
And then it's implement or draft and develop the policies that will address the specific gender needs.
Ensuring children protection online. We cannot make a general, broad ICT policy that is going to address everything equally. It cannot.
We're moving from equality to equitable distribution and target them specifically.
So with online, with women, we have to educate those who are not educated. Those who work in fairs sectors, we need to target these specific needs. When we do that, it's to encourage them to use the technologies. Now we've gone beyond access. Availability is there. Someone mentioned meaningful connection, which is key. To be able to address this and make it meaningful, we need to understand the issues.
So cross‑sector collaboration, in terms of preparing ICT policy is key is addressing mainstream issues in digital connections.
>> RISPER AROSE: Very, very well said. Ivy, thank you. I don't want to dilute it further. You want to take this time to see if there's any question on here or online. We have time for comments or questions that you would want to contribute.
>> EL KHOURY CYNTHIA: From the IGF Ghana Hub: Women are the backbone of every society. There are fewer women taking part in the digital connectivity strategy. All they need is motivation guidance and support to get a lot of them in the space to make better policy.
>> RISPER AROSE: Thank you so much. I would like to extend gratitude to our panellists for your valuable contribution to this discussion. I would say that we cannot talk about inclusivity because it's to the goal of connecting the unconnected as well as bridging the digital gap. So it's important to always think about inclusivity at all aspects of connectivity as we implement in our different countries.
We are really grateful for the time the regulators have put aside to come and share insights for the communities, for sharing what are some of the challenges as well as best practice that can be developed further.
Today's session has really reminded us that gender mainstreaming is not about ticking a box. It's not about an afterthought. It's about shifting policy and practice to ensure that, as Emma has correctly said, no one is left behind.
As you continue this conversation throughout the remaining few days, let's remain intentional in asking who is missing and why are they missing, and how can we redesign systems so they are truly inclusive by design and default.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you to the IGF team for making this hybrid exchange possible.
Yes. Once again, thank you all. I look forward to seeing you in other spaces.
(Applause)