Proposal for the International Development Committee
by Professor Dorothea Kleine
Director, Sheffield Institute for Global Sustainable Development
Lead, Digital, Data and Innovation Research Group
University of Sheffield
(also former Co-Chair of ICT4DNorth, the alliance of ICT4D researchers at universities in the North of England)
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21 years of academic research and collaboration with practitioners on digital for development and on gender in development.
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Proposal (500 words):
Combining the priorities of Digital Transformation and Gender Equality
It has been recognised by the international development community that digital transformation can play a key role in different development sectors. This was emphasised in the International Development White Paper (Nov 23, Chapter 8).
Examples include agriculture (e.g. AI supported advice on identifying pests), education (e.g. access to online educational resources), market access (e.g. mobile money; trading platforms), health (e.g. remote support), climate adaptation (e.g. warning systems), accountability through better data.
The field used to be called ICT4D (information and communication technologies for development), now also described as digital development or digital transformation. In many years of research (and with observing costly failures despite undoubted potential) we have learned to see these not as simply technical solutions but as socio-technical solutions that need to be co-designed with users. British universities (Manchester, Sheffield, IDS/Sussex, Oxford etc) are among the globally leading institutions in this area of research.
However, much of the discussion of the digital transformation is gender-blind, assuming men as the implicit default. STEM subjects, including Computer Science and Data Science, are still heavily male-dominated. Women are frequently framed as late adopters that need to be digitally included, rather than centring their agency and encouraging them to co-design.
Yet women have both the right to co-design digital futures (in line with SDG 5 Gender Equality) and they have been shown to be, in development practice, often key actors in community development, agriculture, education, in family health (links to key other SDGs).
Work needs to be done to connect these two areas. At the moment the digital transformation agenda is driven by the priorities of men, instead of investing in women’s ability to co-design the digital transformation.
We have done work, funded by UKRI GCRF, developing in the GeDIA network (Gender Just Digital Innovation in Africa) a research agenda with African and UK/European partners. This has received further funding (2022-2024) from the International Development Research Council (IDRC) of Canada in the GeJuSTA project https://gejusta.net/. Our work foci have been: Enablers for Women in STEM Research; Increasing Female Representation in Data Science in Africa; and Mainstreaming Gender Analysis and Gender-aware Co-design Methodologies. As women and male allies, from the UK and several African countries, we have explored how to embed gender justice in digital transformation.
The ID Committee should examine this area because a) gender equality is central to achieving the SDGs and ensuring that no one is left behind and b) digital transformation is a very promising lever for innovation, improved effectiveness and accountability. The two areas, digital transformation and gender equality, currently sit in separate parts of the UK government ID strategy but need to be connected – the ID Committee can play a central role in bringing these parts together (policies, actions and spending).
The UK has the opportunity to project with this a foreign policy that is progressive in two ways,
firstly championing a pro-equity vision of the digital transformation, and
secondly championing the rights of women and girls.
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