Technology must benefit women, says Mlambo-Ngcuka
UNITED NATIONS: The head of the UN women’s agency is calling for the revolution in technology to be used to benefit the world’s poor, and especially women, who will not achieve gender equality without “the giant leap that 21st century innovations can bring”.
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said in an interview and a speech before the Commission on the Status of Women’s annual meeting starting today that sanitation, clean water, good roads, affordable internet service and use of cellphones to transfer money and pay bills were critical to changing women’s lives.
“We have made progress towards gender equality. We have more women in significant roles, but we’re still leaving many, many more women behind,” the executive director of UN Women said.
“Sometimes we even lose the gains that we’ve already made. And that is why we are emphasising the importance of innovation and technology.”
Mlambo-Ngcuka stressed that “the 21st century is about large ideas, scale and speed”.
If technology and innovation weren’t used to promote equality for women from agriculture and education to finance and health, she said, the Fourth Industrial Revolution of rapid technological change would happen, “and the women will still be living in the previous industrial revolution, which also did not work for them very well”.
Mlambo-Ngcuka said: “The good news is that for many of the problems we have today there are solutions that we know about.”
She pointed to affordable internet service and the use of “mobile money” through cellphones that was changing the lives of women in Kenya in the same way that microcredit – small loans – had enabled hundreds of thousands of women in other developing countries to start businesses.
In some countries, “mobile money” could be used to pay for the delivery of water or buying of energy, “so it’s not a luxury to have that kind of infrastructure”, Mlambo-Ngcuka said. “It’s a game-changer. It changes for better the GDP of countries.”
She noted that 80% of women in low-income and middle-income countries owned cellphones, and “it would be a historic mistake to fail to make deliberate use of these technologies to advance gender equality”.
Mlambo-Ngcuka said improving infrastructure to provide clean water meant that girls didn’t have to walk long distances to get water from a river and boiled it.
She said: “Providing free water, electricity and social protection for the poor has meant more children go to school and stay in school, and parents are able to have a decent life and reduce malnutrition.”
In Rwanda, Mlambo-Ngcuka said, drones were being used to deliver medicine to rural areas, and in West Africa, drones were being used to oversee fields and sprinkle organic material to kill pests. She said blockchain technology – storing digital information about transactions in a public database – could be used to deliver services to displaced people.
But Mlambo-Ngcuka said: “The bad news is that even though there are solutions, they are not being taken into account fully, even where it reduces the cost.” |