Strategies for Gender Equity in ICT Access and Use

Access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) is no longer a luxury – it’s a prerequisite for economic participation, civic engagement, and social mobility. Yet roughly 250 million fewer women are online globally compared to men, and over 1.7 billion women do not own a mobile phone. This gap is not accidental. It is the product of policy blind spots, infrastructure decisions that ignore women’s realities, educational systems that have historically sidelined girls in science and technology, and financial structures that exclude women entrepreneurs. Closing it requires deliberate, multi-pronged strategies – and understanding those strategies is essential for anyone thinking seriously about gender equity in the digital age.

Why gender-sensitive ICT policy is the starting point 🔗

Most national ICT policies are written with a universal user in mind – but that “universal” user is often implicitly male. Gender concerns must be built into both the content and the process of policy development. This means more than adding a paragraph about women in an otherwise standard policy document. It means ensuring women are represented in the committees that draft these policies, that gender-disaggregated data informs every decision, and that measurable gender equality goals are embedded in national digital strategies from the outset.

According to UNDP, governments at national and sub-national levels need to develop and deploy gender-transformative digital strategies – ones that include specific targets, accountability mechanisms, and adequate public investment to remove barriers women face in the digital world, including issues of skills, equipment, digital safety, and funding. The OECD similarly emphasizes that national strategies and targeted educational programmes are necessary to encourage women to develop digital skills and balance their professional and personal responsibilities. Without this policy foundation, every other intervention risks being piecemeal and unsustainable.

A key policy tool highlighted by international bodies is enshrining digital rights into law, protecting women’s online privacy, and equipping the judiciary to address technology-facilitated gender-based violence. The SDG Knowledge Hub recommends that governments also audit their own websites for gender relevance and prioritize local-language content that directly serves women’s informational needs.

Improving physical access: getting women to the network 🔗

Building infrastructure is necessary but not sufficient. Where access points are placed, and who can safely and comfortably use them, matters enormously. In many contexts, women face restrictions on mobility, social surveillance, and domestic responsibilities that prevent them from traveling to internet cafés or telecentres in town centres.

Effective strategies focus on locating access points where women already go – health clinics, cooperative society offices, community centres, and schools. Adding internet connectivity to existing telephone shops in underserved areas reduces the need for women to travel far. Common-use facilities, rather than individual device ownership, can also be a viable short-term bridge, particularly in low-income communities.

The World Bank’s gender and digital inclusion programme focuses on providing last-mile connectivity in safe community locations tailored for women, and on exploring consumer financing options for affordable smartphones for low-income and unbanked women. The programme’s Digital Empowerment and Equity Program (DEEP), run in collaboration with the Gates Foundation, aims to scale progress toward digital inclusion specifically in low-income countries. The logic is straightforward: physical proximity to a device or network is the first barrier. If women cannot reach the network in the first place, no amount of training or content will help.

Education and training: rethinking who gets to learn 🔗

Digital access without digital literacy is a limited resource. A woman who owns a smartphone but cannot read, navigate an interface, or evaluate information online is still effectively excluded from the digital economy. This is why improving women’s and girls’ access to education – at every level – is central to any serious strategy for gender equity in ICT.

Starting early: girls in school 🔗

Schools are often the first place children encounter technology. Plan International argues that ensuring girls have equal access to technical skills and digital literacy training in school is foundational. If governments make ICT subjects compulsory and gender-inclusive at the primary and secondary level, girls are far more likely to develop the confidence and competence to engage with digital tools throughout their lives. Scholarships specifically targeting girls in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are another important lever, given that by age 15, fewer than 1% of girls on average across OECD countries aspire to work as ICT professionals.

Retraining women already in the workforce 🔗

For women who are already working – in agriculture, manufacturing, retail, or informal sectors – retraining courses that integrate digital skills into their existing occupational context are far more effective than generic computer classes. Training methodologies also need review: programmes that are designed around women’s schedules (factoring in caregiving responsibilities), conducted in local languages, and held in accessible locations tend to have significantly better outcomes. CSIS notes that the private sector can be a valuable partner by funding and providing expertise to vocational schools and higher education institutions to develop courses and scholarships for women in ICT – a model that has worked across multiple developing economies.

Providing access to capital: the finance-ICT link 🔗

Even when a woman has the skills and the physical access to use digital tools for entrepreneurship, she frequently lacks the capital to start or scale an ICT-based business. Women entrepreneurs in developing countries face significant barriers in accessing credit – traditional banks often require collateral that women don’t own, and loan processes can be designed in ways that systematically exclude them.

Microfinance schemes have emerged as one of the most effective solutions to this problem. The most widely cited example is Grameen Telecom’s Village Phone Programme in Bangladesh. Founded in 1995 by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, the programme enabled rural women – referred to as “phone ladies” – to offer telecom services using microcredit-funded mobile phones. Village women accessed micro-credit to acquire GSM cellular phones and subsequently resold phone calls and services within their villages, turning a loan into a viable income-generating business.

The model was elegant in its design: the microfinance institution earned money from the loan and a percentage of airtime sales, the telecom provider expanded into a new rural market, and the Village Phone operator built a sustainable small business – with no subsidies involved. The programme eventually reached over one million subscribers and was replicated in Uganda and other countries. Crucially, placing the phone in a woman’s home created a safe, socially acceptable space for other women in the village to access communication services, addressing both the economic and social dimensions of the access problem.

The Village Phone model demonstrates a broader principle: linking women to ICT is not just a technical or educational challenge – it is a financial one. Microfinance, grants for women-led tech businesses, and targeted public investment in women’s digital entrepreneurship are all essential components of a comprehensive strategy.

The Indian context: a layered challenge 🔗

India presents one of the starkest illustrations of the gendered digital divide at scale. According to India’s National Family Health Survey (2019-21), only one in three women in India has ever used the internet, compared to more than half of men. In rural India, men are nearly twice as likely as women to have used the internet. India is also home to an estimated 691 million women – making the scale of both the problem and the opportunity immense.

A triple disadvantage 🔗

Research by Observer Research Foundation identifies a “triple disadvantage” for Indian women: a rural-urban divide (rural broadband penetration is just 29% against a national average of 51%), an income-based divide (data costs consume a disproportionate share of low-income household budgets), and intra-household discrimination, where women are simply not permitted to use shared devices within their own homes. This last barrier is particularly important because it is invisible to infrastructure-focused policies – you can build a tower, but you cannot mandate that a husband share his phone.

Specific recommendations for India 🔗

Several strategies are particularly relevant to the Indian context. Promoting women’s access to emerging technologies – not just basic internet, but AI-enabled platforms, digital finance, and e-commerce tools – is critical as India’s digital economy advances rapidly. Developing computerized resources on women’s issues, in regional languages and accessible formats, ensures that digital content is not only available but actually useful to women navigating health, legal, agricultural, and economic questions.

Supporting women’s networking initiatives is equally important. Groups like self-help groups (SHGs), women’s collectives, and digital cooperatives create peer-learning environments where women can develop skills and confidence together, without the social stigma that sometimes accompanies individual technology use. India’s “Digital Sakhis” – young women trained as digital literacy ambassadors – are one example of this approach working at scale. Young women known as Digital Sakhis from Madhya Pradesh have been challenging discriminatory social norms through smartphone use, demonstrating that digitally empowered women can lead community-level transformation.

Finally, encouraging women’s involvement in technological innovation and decision-making addresses the root cause rather than just the symptoms. India also needs a robust, nationally representative dataset that captures gender-disaggregated ICT statistics, since the current absence of such data makes it difficult to target policy interventions effectively or measure their impact. In 2024, the Women in the Digital Economy Fund (WiDEF) – a joint effort of USAID, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Reliance Foundation – launched its first round of grants in India specifically to address barriers of access, affordability, digital literacy, and online safety for women.

Why these strategies must work together 🔗

Each of the four strategic areas – policy, physical access, education, and capital – addresses a distinct layer of the problem. But they are interdependent. A gender-sensitive policy without adequate funding for access infrastructure remains a document. Physical access without digital literacy produces limited use. Training without capital leaves women unable to monetize their skills. And capital without a supportive policy environment struggles against legal, regulatory, and social headwinds.

As CSIS notes, the full benefits of digitization cannot be achieved without a coordinated strategy that includes women throughout the design and implementation process. Digital tools that are not designed around women’s experiences risk growing different divides and exacerbating different challenges. Gender equity in ICT access is not a side programme – it is a prerequisite for an inclusive digital future. The strategies that work are those that treat women not as beneficiaries to be reached, but as agents whose participation shapes the technology itself.

What do you think? Given that the Village Phone model in Bangladesh showed that microfinance and mobile technology together could empower rural women economically, why do you think similar models have not been scaled more widely in countries like India – is it a policy failure, a social one, or something else? And when women are excluded from the committees and teams that design ICT policy, what kinds of blind spots do you think inevitably get built into those policies?

References

1. https://2021-2025.state.gov/narrowing-the-gender-digital-divide-empowering-girls-around-the-globe-to-build-digital-skills-for-a-lifetime/
2. https://digitalguides.undp.org/guide/gender-equal-economies
3. https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/sub-issues/gender-equality-and-digital-transformation.html
4. https://sdg.iisd.org/commentary/guest-articles/what-is-the-gender-digital-divide-and-why-should-it-matter-for-the-sdgs/
5. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/digital/brief/gender-and-inclusion-in-digital
6. https://plan-international.org/quality-education/bridging-the-digital-divide/
7. https://www.csis.org/analysis/leveraging-digital-technologies-advance-womens-economic-empowerment
8. https://www.grameentelecom.net.bd/stories/grameen-telecoms-village-phone
9. https://www.comminit.com/content/grameen-telecoms-village-phone-programme-multi-media-case-study
10. https://www.unapcict.org/sites/default/files/2019-01/Village%20Phone%20Replication%20Manual.pdf
11. https://india.unfpa.org/en/news/stage-has-been-set-gender-equity-digital-india
12. https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/indias-gendered-digital-divide
13. https://india.unfpa.org/en/news/india-needs-double-down-bridging-its-digital-gender-gap
14. https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/social-identity/digital-gender-divide-amidst-india-s-service-led-growth
15. https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/women-in-the-digital-economy-fund-widef-launches-new-round-of-funding-to-accelerate-digital-inclusion-for-women-in-india/