A major lobby is growing within the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Gender Caucus to have governments and other stakeholders establish a fund specifically to benefit women in their use of information technologies.
The lobby is spearheaded by the United Nations Fund for Women (Unifem). It comes in the wake of a similar but controversial proposal regarding the Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF) to finance Internet infrastructure projects in developing countries. The DSF is a Senegal-initiated proposal that has faced stiff opposition, especially from the USA.
Speaking during a WSIS Gender Caucus debate on priority issues for African women, Unifem’s Dr Laketch Dirasse stressed that the DSF does not adequately address women’s concerns about information technologies.
Dirasse said, ‘The DSF is good, but women would still need to lobby for 50% of the fund to be directed to their projects. That is why we need a fund that will be exclusively for women.”
Dirasse said the E-quality fund could be established parallel to the DSF and would not be in competition with it, but would rather complement it.
Other needs that were identified as specific to Africa included the need for capacity building, skills reinforcement, lobbying and advocacy, the convergence of new and old media and the defeminisation of poverty.
All the panelists also stressed the need for a new UN convention that would go beyond the existing Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), saying that the new convention would incorporate issues peculiar to Africa and African women.
The WSIS Gender Caucus is a multi-stakeholder group consisting of women and men from national governments, civil society organisations, non-governmental organisations, the private sector and the United Nations system. The objective of the WSIS Gender Caucus is to ensure that gender equality and women’s rights are integrated into WSIS, its processes and outcomes.
In a separate development linked to the WSIS, a conference showcasing the disinformation about Muslim women was cancelled at the last minute. It was organised by the Muslim World League Women’s Committee and was intended to illustrate the difference between knowledge and information. No reason was given for the no-show and conference delegates were left waiting for almost an hour before a UN volunteer announced its cancellation. — Hana