The GSMA Connected Women programme is delighted to have won a ‘Global Achiever’ Award in the field of gender equality and ICT in the 2015 GEM-TECH Awards, held in Busan, South Korea, in October 2014.
The awards, co-organised by the ITU and UN Women, were launched in June this year in order to highlight outstanding achievements in gender equality and mainstreaming through ICT, and attracted over 360 nominations from organisations and individuals from more than 70 countries across the world.
The ‘Global Achievers’ category recognises exceptional long-term commitment to furthering the issue of ICT and gender. Along with GSMA Connected Women, the other winners of the Global Achievers Award included Alcatel-Lucatel, Cisco Systems, Geena Davis, Intel and former Serbian Minister of Communications, Jasna Matić.
Accepting the award from Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Belinda Exelby, Head of International Affairs, Government and Regulatory Affairs, commented that “Women and girls are at the heart of development. Investing in women and girls makes economic and social sense. As Hillary Clinton (and someone else before her) once said: "If you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime. But you teach a woman to fish and she’ll feed the whole village."
This ITU Award is the second recent honour for the Connected Women programme. It follows the recent announcement in September 2014 that GSMA Connected Women is part of a Clinton Global Initative (CGI) Commitment to Action to increase women’s participation in the mobile economy, along with our partners Ooredoo, Indosat, Qualcomm Wireless, Roshan and Smart Communications. Some of the commitments include conducting and publishing two large-scale research studies into women as consumers and as employees across the mobile ecosystem, and then working with mobile operators in order to increase female participations based on some of the findings.
To find out more about the ITU Award, click here. You can watch a video of the winners here.
To find out more about the CGI Commitment, click here.