i. Shifts in Norms

1. Ensuring that gender and e-service delivery policies go hand-in-hand.

   Institutional ownership of the gender mainstreaming agenda in sectoral e-government policymaking processes (across agriculture, health, education and other domains) is key to promoting women’s empowerment and gender equality through technology. Gender equality considerations should be adopted at each stage of the e-government maturation process (UNPOG, cited in UNESCAP 2016)35:

   • Emerging stage: There should be efforts for creating an online presence for the national gender machinery and putting gender policies online.
   • Enhanced stage: When e-government proceeds to this stage where applications for schemes and programmes are downloadable, care should be taken to ensure that such applications for initiatives of the ministry of women are available.
   • Transactional stage: Individualized services for women should be available.
   • Connected stage: There should be one-stop-shop portals for women-directed services as well as integration of such services with generic one-stop-shop portals.

2. Incorporating gender based inclusion as a norm in e-service delivery systems.

   E-citizen charters offer an important route for institutionalising norms for gender-responsive services. Norms should provide freedom of choice of service delivery channels/ modes, enable a proper balance of technology and human elements in service delivery design, and provide avenues for consulting women:

   • Women should be able to opt for either online or offline channels, based on their preferences.
   • Support should be provided for tracking of applications and individual and collective grievance redress.
   • Regular and ongoing consultations should be undertaken to assess women’s needs and priorities accurately.

ii. Shifts in rules

1. Formulating clear rules to cushion e-services from political volatility.

   Gender-responsive e-service delivery implementation is contingent upon political will and commitment in the highest tiers of governments. It requires specialised agencies with dedicated budgets and specific, time-bound targets for the development of women-directed services and gender-responsive roll-out. To ensure timely progress towards these ends, clear rules, backed by appropriate public policy and legislative processes for e-service delivery programmes should be developed.

2. Institutionalised arrangements for effective coordination between national women’s machinery and e-government agency.

   The Ministry of Women should be entrusted with the responsibility of evolving policy guidelines on ‘women’s digital citizenship and e-government’ as a basic protocol for other departments and ministries. These policy guidelines should ensure that decision-making structures in e-government include women, and e-service delivery design is participatory, involving consultations with women, women’s organisations working on various issues, and gender experts. The partnership between the e-government department and the national women’s ministry should also be institutionalised to ensure sustainability.

3. Technology governance frameworks for gender-inclusive service delivery.

   Interoperability protocols that enable alignment between business processes, information and data architectures of different departments/agencies, contributes to better inter-ministerial coordination in e-service delivery efforts.

   The adoption of open, non-proprietary standards and tools in the design of e-service delivery initiatives is essential, to prevent the exclusion of citizens accessing e-services from low-end devices and slow connections. Considering that the majority of women face affordability barriers in terms of access to connectivity (and by extension, e-services), such standards setting is essential for gender-inclusive service delivery. Standards that support local language content is another priority area.

   The design of data taxonomies in beneficiary databases in e-service delivery systems becomes extremely important for inclusive targeting. For example, the state government of Tamil Nadu, India, came out with a welfare policy for transgenders in 2016, that led to provisions for gender dysphoric individuals to record their ‘third gender’ status in entitlement application forms. The government of Malaysia’s national poverty databank (e-Kasih) records individual incomes of each household member separately, instead of recording aggregate household level income. This is to account for intra-household gender disparities in income distribution, and ensure that households are not treated as a homogenous unit, in the design of economic empowerment programmes (Kuga Thas 2017)36.

   Further, governments should invest in the development of effective legal-policy frameworks for data protection and open data that safeguard vulnerable women’s right to privacy and further their capabilities to demand accountability from service providers.

4. Frameworks for governing Public-Private-Partnerships (PPP).

   To fill expertise gaps in the design and roll-out of e-service delivery, governments often resort to PPP arrangements. To ensure that citizen accountability in e-service delivery systems is not undermined, these arrangements should be backed by clear partnership agreements that delineate respective roles and responsibilities of state agencies and private sector partners in terms of fulfilling service delivery guarantees to vulnerable women.

iii. Shifts in Practices

1. Encouraging public interest intermediation of e-service delivery.

   Marginalised women with limited access to connectivity and lacking digital literacy often need intermediation/ facilitation to take advantage of emerging e-services. To ensure that new layers of vested interests do not emerge to fill this gap, it becomes important for governments to promote public interest intermediation of e-service delivery systems. Even in mature e-government contexts, some degree of intermediation may be necessary, especially to support first time users, migrants, older populations and remote and rural communities. Partnerships with civil society organisations for information and service intermediation, and for research and monitoring of e-service delivery through gender audits may be useful.

2. Monitoring e-government through a ‘digital citizenship index’.

   The efficacy of e-government for women’s empowerment depends very much on reliable statistics that support monitoring and evaluation. At the national level, it would be useful to build the data capacity for collecting and collating sex-disaggregated data for relevant indicators within that specific context. These should include (UNESCAP 2016):

   • service delivery aspects including the number of women-oriented services and number of women accessing m-services;
   • human capacity issues like digital literacy;
   • telecommunications indicators like individual data subscription; and
   • institutional maturity dimensions like gender policies in services and infrastructure, ICT policy integration in the women’s machinery and the gendering of data protection laws.

i. Shifts in Norms

1. Guaranteeing women’s rights to full participation in digital democracy.

   Pre-digital legislative frameworks that respect, protect, and promote participation guarantees should be brought up to speed with digital realities. For example, open data protocols need to be harmonised with freedom of information legislation. Similarly, protection from gender-based hate speech in online environments should be incorporated in freedom of expression laws. Datafication of state-citizen interactions brings about new concerns for the right to privacy, which should be addressed through effective data protection legislation.

ii. Shifts in rules

1. Ensuring that online citizen engagement is tied to women’s ‘right to be heard’.

   Online consultations should be backed by clear guidelines for transparency and answerability, to ensure that outcomes of such processes are not arbitrarily altered. It is also vital to combine offline and online processes and use emerging opportunities for online participation to bring women and girls into discussions in the public domain.

iii. Shifts in practices

1. Investing in women’s digital capabilities.

   National digital literacy programmes should incorporate a well-defined women-directed component. While digital literacy is often seen as a one-time effort, it is increasingly evident that the technical and social aspects of e-citizenship need various and continuing interventions. Today information, media and data literacies are very much a part of the basic skill set needed to assert one’s rights. The next generation of young women will need to be equipped through formal and non-formal systems so that they develop a discerning and independent relationship with spaces for active citizenship.

i. Shifts in Norms

1. Universalising access to the Internet, for women.

   The UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression (2011) has observed that: "without Internet access, which facilitates economic development and the enjoyment of a range of human rights, marginalized groups and developing States remain trapped in a disadvantaged situation, thereby perpetuating inequality both within and between States”.

   Internet access has become integral to individual well-being and full participation in social, economic and political life. However, affordability and gender social norms continue to remain a major barrier to women’s access to connectivity architectures and effective use of the Internet. Against this backdrop, policy guarantees that ensure a data connection of a minimum quality and quantity for women become critical to promote universal access for women.

ii. Shifts in Rules

1. Deploying a range of policy instruments and programmes for gender-responsive universal access.

   This can assume a range of forms:

   • introducing a gender budget in the Universal Service Fund to support a mobile data allowance for marginalised women, development of safe and gender-inclusive telecentre models, and efforts to promote women’s digital literacy.
   • investing in the development of robust national level statistics on sex-disaggregated patterns of access and use of the Internet, so that women’s needs and priorities are effectively addressed, when evolving connectivity policies and programmes.
   • including clear targets to measure progress on gender equality in the design of connectivity policy frameworks.
   • addressing gender based violence through robust legal-institutional frameworks, to ensure a rewarding connectivity experience for women.

iii. Shifts in Practices

1. Catalysing meaningful cultures of use through a public access, telecentre model.

   Public access spaces, if designed appropriately, can contribute to the creation of meaningful cultures of use among women at the grassroots. Successful models are those that have emphasised co-ownership by local women’s collectives, and empathetic and gender-responsive cultures of facilitation. The creative combining of digital possibilities with traditional methods for strengthening information, learning and knowledge processes in communities is equally important. National and global networks (such as Telecentre.org) that enable knowledge sharing and exchange of ‘good practice’ models are useful repositories to consult for insights around the development of such gender-responsive models.

2. Promoting the effective use of mobile phones in citizen outreach:

   As mobile phones break the accessibility barrier for women, m-services are a critical frontier for women’s access to information, services and participation. The next wave of Internet users will be accessing the Internet over the mobile (ITU 2016)37. The game-changing possibilities of mobile phones for information outreach and service delivery need to be leveraged.

   At the same time, it is important to continue to invest in fixed broadband architecture. As the (ITU 2012)38 has highlighted: “ [A total reliance on mobile broadband] effectively restricts the type and quality of applications and services that users can access over the Internet...while mobile-broadband technology helps to increase coverage and offer mobility, the mobile networks and services currently in place usually only allow limited data access, at lower speeds, which often makes mobile-broadband subscriptions unsuitable for intensive users, such as businesses and institutions. High-speed, reliable broadband access is particularly important for the delivery of vital public services, such as those related to education, health and government.”

   Thus, only through a strategy that pays equal attention to mobile and fixed broadband infrastructure development can equitable access to quality Internet be guaranteed.