Presentations PST232
Plugging The Gender Digital Skills Gap: Investing in Potential
Iffat Gill
CEO, The Code To Change, The Netherlands
Social Innovation – Gender Equality – Digital Inclusion
Iffat Gill is an experienced international NGO leader-activist, digital strategist, and social entrepreneur working on gender equality and economic empowerment of women through digital inclusion. With more than 14 years of experience in the non-profit sector, Iffat founded ChunriChoupaal as a training and capacity building initiative for the social and economic empowerment of women in remote areas of the world. Iffat launched ‘The Code To Change’ to bridge the gender and e-skills gap in the technology industry.
Ms. Gill has a strong focus on up-skilling and re-skilling the current talent pool to meet the ever growing and evolving needs of the digital economy.
Her recent success, The Code To Change Pakistan, has trained 80 women in digital skills and the project is now gearing up to launch an extensive program for female entrepreneurs in Southern Punjab, in partnership with Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and Techstars US. The venture is also supporting 200 teachers to build their digital skills in disadvantaged communities of Punjab, Pakistan to enable continued education of children from slum areas.
Iffat has been at the forefront of shaping the policy debate of women’s digital inclusion for close to a decade at grassroots and international level. She has advocated for gender equality through economic empowerment and digital empowerment at the UN’s World Summit on the Information Society-WSIS Forum, the UN’s Internet Governance Forum and the European Parliament.
Iffat's project 'Community Technology Center for Women' in rural Pakistan won the Syster's Award from the Anita Borg Institute and led her to start ChunriChoupaal and The Code To Change.
Iffat’s work has been featured in more than three publications by German government.[1]
Her latest venture is a social enterprise; an Artificial Intelligence enabled EdTech & online Marketplace that aims to train women from global south and connect them to employment opportunities globally. She aims to build a platform that will utilize AI to match the skills of the trainees and connect them to entrepreneurs looking for those skills. The AI will also analyze how the growth trajectory of a trainee will look like if they want to keep growing.
See Iffat’s LinkedIn for more information
[1] Women’s Pathway to the Digital Sector: Stories of Opportunities and Challenges by German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (2017)
Women in Tech: Inspiration, No Fairy Tales by German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (2018)
#eSkills4Girls – An initiative to promote digital skills for women and girls by German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (2020)