ITU Trains Women On ICT Skills

The International
Telecommunication Union (ITU), said it had trained over a million women worldwide on basic Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills.
The ITU Secretary-General, Dr Hamadoun Toure, made the remark in a statement made available to our correspondent in Lagos, last Tuesday.
He said that the training was in partnership with the UN specialised agency for ICT and a Philippines-based NGO, Telecentre.org Foundation.
Toure said that over one million disadvantaged women in 79 countries around the world were now benefiting from the newly-acquired ICT skills.
He said that the training which was based on the ITU’s ‘Women’s Digital Literacy Campaign’ was launched in 2011 with a target of training one million women around the world.
“The training leveraged the combined reach of Telecentre.org Foundation’s global network of 100,000 telecentres worldwide and the ITU’s 193 Member States and 700 private sector members.
“The campaign reached its goal earlier this month with a total of 1,014,096 women trained in basic computer skills, through the efforts of 153 participating organisations and 20,000 telecentres around the world.
“The success of this joint campaign meshes perfectly with this year’s International Women’s Day theme of ‘equality for women is progress for all.’
“This is because training in today’s ICT systems is so often the change that turns around the lives of unskilled and disadvantaged women and their families,’’ the statement quoted Toure as saying.
The Secretary-General said that having the skills to use ICT opened up new horizons and empowered women, both economically and culturally.
According to him, offering digital skills to over one million women at grassroots level is helping to reverse the paradigm whereby, in many countries, ICT still, most often, benefit men more than women.
Our correspondent reports that recent research by the ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau estimated that there are 200 million fewer women online than men. Of the world’s 2.8 billion Internet users, 1.3 billion are women, compared with 1.5 billion men.
The Director of the ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau Mr Brahima Sanou, said that technology is now widely recognised as a critical enabler for socio-economic development.
“Hence, the Women’s Digital Literacy Campaign has been the key in reinforcing the ITU’s global efforts to promote the digital inclusion of women, in line with the Millennium Development Goal 3 on gender equality,’’ Sanou said.
The Executive Director of Telecentre.org Foundation, Mr Miguel Raimilla, said that partnership was the key in any undertaking.