UN Women Webinar on DPGs4DPI for Gender Justice

At its core, Digital Public Infrastructure is about better access to public services, reduced gender discrimination and increased social innovation when delivering key services to vulnerable, last mile populations.

For Digital Public Infrastructure to work for women and girls, governments, regulators, donors, technology providers and CSO advocates must proactively consider the life-cycle of girls to women. All stakeholders should recognize how key components of digital ID, digital payments and data exchange can be leveraged to deliver real benefits for women and girls. 

It is important to realize that the D for Digital in DPG and DPI does not substitute for face-to-face interactions with trusted intermediaries. These can be health care workers or others found at education centres, or self-help groups for women’s empowerment or livelihoods that women and girls attend on a daily basis. DPI along with future grass-roots mobilization and community development need to work in tandem to achieve improved inclusion and society-wide transformation in accessing services. .

During the webinar, the following organizations in South Asia and Southeast Asia presented their DPG4DPI trial initiatives to support women and girls:

Smita Gupta, Curator at Agami and Co-Leader of OpenNyAI explained how the DPG Jugalbandi they developed can deliver responsive access to legal and other services for women and girls experiencing violence. In partnership with iProBono, OpenNyAI developed a prototype of this Julgabandi that can deliver trusted information from iProBono’s database to women through voice messages conveyed in a range of Indian languages by a WhatsApp chatbot or other interface.

Dornnapha Sukkree, Co-founder and Executive Director of Mast Human, shared how the Mast Human Intelligence App aims to deliver trusted information as well as access to justice and protective responses for women who are trafficked, as well as migrant workers facing labour exploitation. Mast Human, Agami and the Southeast Asian Languages in One Network (SEA-LION) are collaborating on adapting the Jugalbandi DPG to be accessible in Southeast Asian languages so that migrant workers or victims of human trafficking can seek advice and assistance in their own tongues.

Tahera Bharmal from eGovernments Foundation, explained how DPGs like DIGIT empower women in three areas: social benefits (fast wage payments), sanitation (waste management), and girls’ education ( rapid granting of scholarships). The same DPG flexibly adapts to these uses at lower costs, while integrating with other DPGs such as identity/payment systems to amplify its impact.

MuktaSoft, a DPI built on DIGIT and deployed in Odisha, India, is revolutionizing both infrastructure development project management and daily wage payment processing. The platform has significantly benefited 1,200 women-led self-help groups and 3,600 wage seekers—45 per cent of whom are women—by reducing payment processing time from 120 days to just six days. Through these improvements, the platform is enhancing financial independence, thereby strengthening users’ participation and economic resilience.

The eGovernments Foundation emphasizes that program success hinges on three factors: inclusive policies, such as self-help group frameworks, equitable program design, and on-the-ground support through training and other resources. Though DPGs enable scalable solutions, these enabling factors ensure real-world adoption, help break barriers and prioritize systems created not merely as technology but for women. 

A crucial part of the solution to design and deploy DPGs4DPI for gender justice is having a cohort of women engineers and designers as part of the tech-enabling partners that build the DPGs and DPI. Arundhathi Krishna heads the Women in Tech team at Tinkerhub and shared how their organization is working to give young women the tech skills they need. This has been accomplished through one of the world’s largest women-only, overnight “hackathons” being run across the State of Kerala in more than 60 locations, attracting almost 4000 registered women participants. The first Hackathon session resulted in 450 projects designed by women engineers aged 18-22, and the third edition of the Tink Her Hack Hackathon will have been staged between January-February 2025

Many partners ask how DPI/DPGs can work for communities, especially women and girls, who do not possess smart phones, internet connections or data plans. Gram Vaani, is an organization whose mission is to enable communities to use appropriate technologies supported by accessible processes and share actionable information that can bring positive changes in their lives. Vijay Sai Pratap, its Co-founder, shared how DPGs4DPI can work with even the simplest phones using time-tested Interactive Voice Response System technology. Gram Vaani has worked with community volunteers to establish a voice-based community media platform Meri Awaz Meri Pehchan or My Voice My Identity focused on the needs and issues of women and girls.

Moritz Fromageot, from the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (ODET) closed the webinar by emphasizing the commitment of the United Nations to ensuring all DPI is safe and inclusive. He demonstrated how the Global Digital Compact aims to increase investment in DPI while ensuring appropriate safeguards. He also offered insights into the DPI Safeguards Initiative, which developed the first universal DPI Safeguards Framework, that stakeholders can use to ensure inclusion, particularly gender inclusion, in the way that DPI is built and deployed.

UN Women announced it was joining the Digital Public Goods Alliance during the Global DPI Summit in October 2024 and committed to advocate for greater knowledge, investment and implementation of DPGs supporting gender justice through the Commission on the Status of Women and other high-level UN meetings.