ICTD InfoBank: A Knowledge Sharing Portal on ICTD for the Asia-Pacific region

As the world learns to live with COVID-19, to emerge from the current crisis, and to “build back better”, UN Women will launch The Feminist Plan for Sustainability and Social Justice, a visionary but practical roadmap for putting gender equality, social justice, and sustainability at the center of the recovery. It will feed into UN Women’s Generation Equality Forum and Action Coalitions, aimed at accelerating commitment, action, and financing for gender equality.

This publication discusses ways to broaden the scope of gender-responsive procurement from a focus on only promoting women’s enterprises to also including gender-responsive enterprises. The publication aims to inspire a transformative conceptualization of gender-responsive procurement that supports both equal market opportunities for women’s enterprises and equal outcomes for women in the labor market and the business environment.

Achieving the global commitment “that no one will be left behind”, as set out by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, will be possible only if ICTs are available, accessible and affordable to all and, in particular, to the disadvantaged groups of society – persons with disabilities, persons with specific needs, including indigenous peoples and people living in rural areas, women and girls, youth and children, as well as older persons.

“Towards building inclusive digital communities”: ITU toolkit and self-assessment for ICT accessibility implementation has been developed to help ITU members and other stakeholders understand the “what, why and how” of ICT accessibility, and its role in building inclusive communities and societies.

The role of the state in the economy is being altered in practice because of the rescue and recovery programmes in the midst of Covid-19. These programmes are extraordinary in scale and in scope and could prove decisive for the world’s low-carbon transition. In the past, government intervention has already proved transformative, creating entirely new markets, including for the internet, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and clean energy.

During its investigations, the UN Secretary-General’s Task Force on Digital Financing of the SDGs recognized that digitalization is not only reshaping the world of finance; it is also driving the emergence of a new generation of global, dominant digital finance platforms (BigFintechs) with increasing cross-border spillover effects on many areas of sustainable development across the world, particularly in developing economies.

This case study explores whether the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can be used as a shared framework for results by development co-operation actors in Samoa. The study offers an introduction to Samoa’s progress in mainstreaming the SDGs in national policy making, as well as in monitoring the SDG targets and indicators.

This paper analyses the gender gaps in access to ICT-related opportunities, with a focus on Europe and Central Asia. It argues that achieving gender equality in ICT policies means going further than investing in women and closing gender gaps. It requires efforts at institutional and policy levels to harness ICTs to serve the goals of equality and justice and ensure that the benefits of data and digitally driven change accrue equally to all.

This report is the result of the collaborative efforts of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment (UN Women). It focuses on actionable recommendations to stakeholders when it comes to women and girls using, studying and working in digital technology in five Western Balkan States (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia) and three Eastern Partnership countries (Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova).

Corruption poses a significant threat to economies around the world. It weakens institutions, erodes public trust, undermines fair competition, and discourages investment. The COVID-19 health crisis has further exposed the vulnerability of procurement systems to corrupt practices when they are not equipped with the necessary tools to ensure transparency, accountability, and integrity throughout the procurement cycle.