At the Global Digital Public Infrastructure Summit in Cairo in October, UN Women announced that it has joined the Digital Public Goods Alliance, a multi-stakeholder initiative that facilitates the development of and investment in digital public goods.
Following the Summit of the Future, where leaders adopted the Global Digital Compact recognizing the potential of digital technologies in transforming our world for the better, UN Women will work with the Digital Public Goods Alliance towards accelerating progress towards gender equality and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Around the world, women and girls continue to have unequal access to rights and opportunities in every aspect of life. While digital technologies and digital public infrastructure can accelerate sustainable and equitable development, it will require a deliberate effort to make sure that the existing gender inequalities are not perpetuated as the world explores these opportunities.
Through its work with the Digital Public Goods Alliance, UN Women will examine how existing digital public infrastructure and digital public goods developed for use in finance, health, education, identity registration can be adapted to advance gender justice.
For example, UN Women is working with partners that have developed existing digital public goods that register a girl's birth and administer social protection programmes to consider how these can work together to better protect girls at risk of child marriage, provide targeted cash transfers to support girls in finishing secondary education and link girls and their families to educational scholarships, health and other services.
"We are delighted to join the Digital Public Goods Alliance. UN Women will focus on the power of digital public goods and infrastructure to transform the spaces where most women and girls access public services, including justice services" said UN Women Deputy Executive Director Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda.
"We should engage with girls and women to develop and build digital pathways together that will allow them to access basic information and communicate with frontline justice workers on the issues that matter most to them," she added.
With UN Women, the Alliance will explore the development of a first-of-its-kind digital solution to protect women and girls from gender-based violence by connecting survivors and their health and social services support teams with legal and paralegal services, social protection, and other public services, as well as the formal justice system.
