UNESCO Pakistan and Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) have collaborated to develop the first Digital Gender Inclusion Strategy of the country. In this regard, a training workshop was held in PTA’s Peshawar Zonal Office, the first in a series of five to discuss with various stakeholders the important issues related to the inclusion of other genders in the digital landscape. The primary goal of the strategy will be to reduce the divide in gender access to digital technologies in Pakistan.

The workshop was attended by experts from the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication (MoITT), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa IT Board, Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA), other telecom operators, members of academia, and digital gender rights groups. During the workshop, head of PTA’s initiative for gender inclusion in ICTs, informed the participants that the “main objective of these workshops is to get input from all relevant stakeholders in the process.”

She said, “we want to ensure that the Digital Gender Inclusion Strategy is responsive to the needs of people and can be effectively integrated into the systems that are already in place.” For this purpose, she added, PTA will collaborate with institutional stakeholders to bridge the digital gender divide in Pakistan. It is pertinent to mention here that the gender inclusion strategy will be developed in collaboration with UNESCO Pakistan. It will recommend specific measures to promote women’s connectivity in the country. The remaining workshops of the series will be arranged in Karachi, Lahore, Quetta and Islamabad.

Credit : Independent News Pakistan-WealthPk