Gender and ICT/About the Authors

Angela M. Kuga Thas has been a member of the APC WNSP since August 2002. An advocate for women’s empowerment and non-discrimination, Angela draws her knowledge and experience from her wider networking and previous work with women’s rights advocates on the CEDAW Convention and in the area of women’s sexual and reproductive health, as well in the provision of micro-credit for poor women. Angela has been particularly active in supporting the work of APC WNSP in its gender and ICT policy advocacy during the processes of the first phase of WSIS. She played a lead role in the APC WNSP’s inaugural Gender and ICT Awards collaborative project with GKP, and in the successful Malaysian replication of WENT, a regional ICT training workshop which was jointly managed annually by the APC WNSP and APWINC on behalf of AWORC from 1999 to 2004. Angela has always been passionate about building up the capacity of others, particularly women, and with a group of like-minded women and men, founded KRYSS (Knowledge and Rights with Young people through Safer Spaces). Working within a gender equality and human rights framework, KRYSS aims to better enable young people in dealing with and addressing identity-based discrimination, and adopts the use of creative arts and expression in our training. A Malaysian, Angela designed the Seed Grant and Small Innovative Project (SGSIP) Fund of the GKP and plays an advisory role to its Youth Social Entrepreneurship Initiative. Angela is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Global Fund for Women and the International Advisory Committee for BRIDGE at the Institute of Development Studies in the United Kingdom. She currently sits on the Board of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development.

Chat Garcia Ramilo is a Filipino national residing in the Philippines. She has been specializing in gender, ICT and women’s electronic networking for the last nine years. Chat is currently the Global Coordinator of APC WNSP. For the last three years, she has managed APC WNSP’s ground-breaking GEM project. As a gender and ICT specialist, Chat has worked as a gender and ICT consultant for UNIFEM, UNESCAP, the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, the Canadian International Development Agency and the World Bank. She has also been a speaker and resource person in international workshops and conferences in many countries. The most recent of these are at the UNESCO Expert Group Meeting on Gender Issues in the Information Society (Paris, July, 2003), United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, 47th Session (New York, March, 2003), Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on WSIS (Tokyo, January 2003), and the UN Division for the Advancement of Women Expert Group Meeting on Information and Communication Technologies and Their Impact On and Use as an Instrument for the Advancement and Empowerment of Women (Seoul, November 2002).

Cheekay Cinco has worked as the Regional Coordinator for GEM for ICTs and Internet-based initiatives, one of the major projects of the APC WNSP in the past three years. As such, she has assisted several projects and initiatives in Asia-Pacific in developing and implementing gender evaluation in their work. She was also involved in drafting and finalizing the current version of the GEM tool . She also assisted the projects supported by GKP through its SGSIP fund in incorporating gender in the evaluation of their projects. Aside from being an active member of the APC WNSP, she is also one of the founding members of WomensHub, a Philippine-based organization that focuses on gender and ICT issues in the Philippines. She is currently managing WomensHub’s project called ‘SheBlogs’, which aims to develop an open source, web management application and website for Filipino women. She has been working in the area of gender and ICT since 1999 when she was the Project Administrator for AWORC, an online regional network of women’s resource centres and organization focusing on utilizing ICTs for women’s empowerment. Her experience in AWORC included managing the network’s regional website for the Five-Year Review of the Beijing Platform for Action. She has also been involved as a trainer, and as part of the coordinating team of the WENT initiative.

APDIP The Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP) is an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) that aims to promote the development and application of information and communication technologies for sustainable human development in the Asia-Pacific region. APDIP aims to meet its goals by focusing on three inter-related core areas: (i) policy development and dialogue; (ii) access; and (iii) content development and knowledge management. APDIP collaborates with national governments, regional, international and multi-lateral development organizations, UN agencies, educational and research organizations, civil society groups, and the private sector in integrating ICTs in the development process. It does so by employing a dynamic mix of strategies – awareness raising, capacity building, technical assistance and advice, research and development, knowledge sharing and partnership building. http://www.apdip.net

APC WNSP The Association for Progressive Communications Women’s Networking Support Program (APC WNSP) was initiated in 1993 in response to several convergent needs and demands from within the women’s movement. It is a global network with over 100 women and their organizations from more than 35 countries. They are individual women and women’s groups and organizations working in the field of gender and ICT. APC WNSP promotes gender equity in the design, development, implementation, and use of ICTs - with special focus on inequities based on women’s social or ethnic background - through the provision of research, training, information, and support activities in the field of ICT policy, skills-sharing in the access and use of ICT, and women’s network-building. http://www.apcwomen.org