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The UN Secretary-General's report (E/CN.6/2010/2) in preparation for the 54th Commission on the Status of Women who undertook the 15 year review of the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action (BpfA), including the section J – Women and Media. Media and ICT are mentioned throughout the Report as important tools for awareness raising and information dissemination, for example, under the…

A regional analysis on the status of women 15 years after the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. The report maps out the progress, gaps and challenges under each of the critical areas of concern in the West, Eastern and Southern sub-regions, with emphasis on the period since the last review in 2004 (Beijing +10). For example, the report argues ,that the ICTs have…

As the international community prepares to join the United Nation’s 49th Session of the Commission on the Status on Women (CSW), women media practitioners are asking: where is women’s “J” spot? Commonly known as “Beijing +10,” the role of the official UN session is to evaluate what governments have done to implement the Platform for Action (PFA) of the Fourth World Conference on Women 10 years…

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the consideration of gender issues in all research on radio, convergence and development in Africa. It is intended to guide the deliberations at our Butare roundtable (September 2009) discussion on a research agenda and to ensure that we put gender considerations front and centre as we design our research plans.

Lucy Niño and Lida Nuñez look at how the Colombian government has paid special attention to ICT policies, offering ICT literacy programmes and ICT inclusion in marginalised areas, while at the same time ICTs are used to promote prostitution and pornography produced in the country via the internet and cellphones. Government has produced a campaign to foster a “healthy use” of internet and to…

Jac SM Kee and Sonia Randhawa highlight forms of VAW that have received recognition in Malaysia and provide the context of ICT development and national policy objectives in this paper. It is not an exhaustive assessment of the current state of VAW, but rather aims to surface some of the interconnections between ICT issues and VAW and areas of potential opportunities for advocacy, as well as…

This article examines the relationships that exist between gendered access to education and the ways in which mobile phones, fixed phones, and the Internet are perceived and used in a rural and an urban Bhutanese community. The findings, organized by levels of literacy, reveal similar patterns in ICT perceptions and use across the two communities.

The findings of this research indicates there were attempts to identify and eliminate gender disparities in access and use of ICT within the Uganda national ICT policy development process. However clear-cut gender incorporation strategy was missing, and the ICT policy process was largely dominated by men. This The report includes a set of recommendations how to further enhance gender equality…

Willie Currie outlines the current financing trends and challenges in the ICTD sector at the panel “Communication Rights for Women - Why the Purse feels empty? Financing for women's equitable access to Information and Communication Technologies”, organised by APC WNSP, UN DAW and IWTC during the 52nd session of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York in February 2008.

Radhika Lal, a policy advisor on ICT for poverty reduction and the Millenium Development Goals (MDG) in the UNDP, presents her views on effective financing mechanisms to progress gender equality in the information society. This was presented at the panel “Communication Rights for Women - Why the Purse feels empty?: Financing for women's equitable access to Information and Communication…