The Transport & ICT GP and the Gender CCSA present:
Gender & ICT: A Gender Gap Analysis of Zambia
Hosted by Susan Ulbaek, Executive Director of the Nordic and Baltic Countries, The World Bank Group
Dr. Alison Gillwald from Research ICT Africa (RIA) will be presenting early findings of a recent ICT gap analysis in Zambia focusing on ICTs and gender.The seminar will give the audience an opportunity to learn about the issue of Information Communication Technology (ICT) and gender as contextualized in sub-Saharan Africa.
The presentation will highlight innovative methods for evidence gathering under conditions of data and information constraint experienced in Zambia but which pertains to most African countries. Using the continent-wide supply data, particularly pricing, collected by RIA and collated from other databases to measure ICT sector performance to diagnose the areas of underperformance. In particular, it will benchmark Zambia’s performance in relation to peer nations. Using demand side data from multi-country, nationally representative ICT access and use surveys, undertaken by RIA, or other national data sets such as labour force or national household surveys where ICT surveys are not available, it will examine the issue of gender in the context of digital equality. It will demonstrate the importance of surveys as the only means of gathering gender disaggregated statistics in a pre-paid mobile communication environment found across Africa and the potential dangers for policy formulation and regulation without such evidence and of localized/micro studies making national and regional claims. More importantly it will highlight the need to move beyond descriptive statistics reflect in national indicators that tend to mask the underlying factors of gender (and other) inequality, through modelling and analysis that can provide a more nuanced understandings of the determining factors of gender and other inequalities.
