International Women's Day 2023 | FAO & ITU Webinar on Innovation and digitalization for gender equality

The webinar, jointly organized by the Food Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), marks the celebration of International Women’s Day 2023, dedicated this year to the theme “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality”. This theme is aligned with the priority theme for the upcoming 67th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW-67): “Innovation and technological change, and education in the digital age for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls”.

Objectives
Identifying approaches and solutions that help close the gender digital gap for rural women and women working in agrifood value chains is critical for accelerating efforts towards inclusive rural transformation in the Near East and North Africa region (NENA). This requires gaining a better understanding of men’s and women’s specific needs and interests, their roles and capacity needs, as well as the best channels to reach out to them – which may be different, depending on their gender, age, and socio-economic conditions.

The webinar aims to share experiences and perspectives of different experts and organizations working on digital inclusion in the NENA region and showcase experiences that proved to be successful in facilitating rural women’s access, use and adoption of digital solutions, and how this can, in turn, facilitate inclusive and sustainable agrifood development.

More specifically, the webinar aims to:

• Raise awareness on the challenges that prevent women’s digital and technology inclusion, with a focus on rural areas and agrifood value chains in the NENA region
• Share experiences and programmes that promote inclusive and gender-equitable access to innovation, technology and digitalization across the agricultural and rural sector in the NENA region
• Reflect on the characteristics that make these interventions successful in reaching out and benefitting women equally, and how these can be replicated in other projects

 

Link of the recording: here  Passcode: *=W6N?1A

AGENDA                                                   

Time	Subject	Speaker
11:00	Welcoming remarks	Serge Nakouzi, Deputy Regional Representative for the Near East and North Africa, FAO Regional Office for the Near East and North Africa
11:15	Panel discussion	Moderator: Maggie Refaat, FAO Gender Specialist   Experiences and lessons learned from:          · Rouda Al Amir, Programme Officer and Regional Focal Point for digital inclusion, ITU Arab Regional Office · Jeanne Schmitt, Chief Technical Advisor, ILO ·  Reham Gharbiye,  Independent Consultant and former Country Director, AWEF ·  Amr Soliman, National Council of Women Board member, Chair of economic & environment committees
12:15	Q&A	Q&A session
12:45	Closing remarks	May Hani, FAO Senior Policy Officer

Webcast