United Nations: With a focus on highlighting good practices and experiences by India on women’s digital empowerment. The Permanent Mission of India to the UN will host a special discussion on leveraging public-private commitment for women’s access to technology.
India’s Permanent Mission will host a panel discussion on ‘Leveraging Public-Private Commitment for Women’s Greater Access to Technology and Education’ Monday that will be moderated by Susan Ferguson, Country Representative, UN Women India.
The discussion will take place on the margins of the ongoing session of the Commission on the Status of Women.
There will be speakers, including India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj, Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Deputy Executive Director of UN Women Anita Bhatia, Joint Managing Director, Apollo Hospitals Dr Sangita Reddy and Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, LinkedIn Ms Melissa Selcher among other experts.
The panel discussion aims to share good practices and experiences by India on women’s digital empowerment; share UN Women India’s strategic partnerships with the private sector, including through Business Sector Advisory Council in co-creating an enabling environment for women’s access to technology and education and explore opportunities for public-private partnerships to scale digital innovations to address the gender digital divide for women’s empowerment and gender equality, a concept note on the event said.
On margins of the Commission on the Status of Women, the Permanent Mission of India will also co-host an India Roundtable on ‘Grassroots Leadership and Transformation: Charting the path of empowerment through technology and skill development’. It will also host an informal briefing on G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting and G20 Foreign Ministers Meeting that was held in India recently.
The 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) commenced on March 6 and will run through March 17 at the UN Headquarters here in New York. The priority theme of this year’s CSW is ‘Innovation and technological change, and education in the digital age for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls’ while the review theme is ‘Challenges and opportunities in achieving gender equality and the empowerment of rural women and girls.’
Outcomes expected from the India-hosted panel discussion include identifying potential areas to leverage the private sector’s thought and action leadership to move the needle on gender equality focusing on access to technology and education and experience sharing by other countries on good practices around women’s access to technology and education that can be replicated at scale.
Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India has moved from women’s development to women-led development in the last nine years.
Addressing the post-budget webinar on women empowerment, Modi highlighted that enrolment of women in the fields of engineering, science, technology and maths in the country today was 42 percent.
The prime minister also said around 70 percent of beneficiaries of the Mudra loan are women. These women are not only increasing the earnings of their families but are also opening new economic avenues for the nation, he said.
PTI