USAID-Gates initiative moves ahead with closing gender digital divide

An initiative to close the gender digital divide announced last year by United States Vice President Kamala Harris is gaining steam at this year’s U.N. General Assembly. The Women in the Digital Economy Fund, or WiDEF, a $60 million initiative funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Gates Foundation, last Friday announced two new partners to its roster: the India-based Reliance Foundation and the UPS Foundation. It also unveiled the 20 semifinalists that made the cut for WiDEF’s first funding round — 85% of which are women-led. It’s an elite cohort. The call for proposals was flooded with over 1,350 applications from 98 countries. WiDEF also released a report detailing the state of women’s digital inclusion — and in many ways, it’s in a sorry state, with 244 million more men than women using the internet in 2023. And in low-income countries, just one-fifth of women have access to the internet compared with one-third of men. “The gender digital divide is even more pervasive in rural communities,” the report states. “It reflects existing societal gender disparities that, when not addressed comprehensively, will continue to harm women and girls and restrict women’s rights to development, thriving livelihoods, and economic participation sustained by a growing digital economy.” In addition to promising success stories, the report outlines policy recommendations including collecting sex-disaggregated data on internet access, adoption, affordability, use, and attitudes — and using that data to adopt time-bound, targeted, evidence-based solutions. Those solutions need to be locally tailored and nuanced, because the picture is nuanced, said Christian Pennotti, chief of party and managing director of WiDEF for CARE, which is managing the initiative along with the GSMA Foundation and the Global Digital Inclusion Partnership. “For the first time in three years, we've seen a narrowing of the gender digital divide from 19% to 15%, so that is encouraging. At the same time, we still have gender gaps in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in the realm of 30% … and that's where the vast majority of women and girls offline live,” he told Devex. “There's sort of promise amongst persistent challenges,” he added. “We're not going backwards in as many places as we were, but we're also certainly not accelerating at the rate that we would need to in order to achieve the SDGs. “So from that perspective, I think it's clear we need solutions in lots of different places. We need policy solutions. We need government programs. We need private sector products and solutions, and we need civil society all to be working in order to make real change. And I think WiDEF’s trying to, in different ways, engage with those different parts of the system.”