Digital fluency platform and mentorship will be India’s gift to the G20 countries, Sangita Reddy, Chair, G20 Empower, has said.
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Speaking on the sidelines of the second G20 Empower meet that began at Kovalam here on Wednesday, Ms. Reddy said techequity would accelerate women’s empowerment. The digital fluency platform, she said, was being put together by representatives of leading companies and local organisations using best technology. It would be a platform of platforms that was open and miltilingual with 120 languages. It would also show content based on persona, say a student, or working woman, or entrepreneur so that people did not get lost in the digital ecosystem. This would be done by asking various questions. For instance, if a woman entrepreneur was getting into business with limited understanding of digital technology and wanted to have a website, then instead of spending money to get it done, they could pursue a course on how to create website and do it on their own.
These were examples of things that the G20 Empower wanted to enable women to do, she said.
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Another impact-oriented initiative was the mentorship platform. Many factors such as lack of education, money, family support, or care economy infrastructure were assumed to be reasons why women did not scale up business. Often though, all they needed was a mentor who themselves had done what the women were trying to do.
So, the idea behind the mentorship platform was getting on board men and women who could guide other women entrepreneurs, find solutions to their problems, or sometimes just encourage them, Ms. Reddy said.
On how the platform operated, she said it would be digital. There would be a matchmaking process and a secure private room for the mentor and mentee to communicate. Some rules would be put in place to ensure there was no cyber bullying or other problems between them.
There would be a significant scaling up of the platform in the next few months, she said.
The G20 Empower agenda centred on education, leadership at all levels, and entrepreneurship. Position papers were made for the agenda, and portions of this got translated into a communique that was the meet’s recommendation to governments across the world, she said. This would be what women in the private sector believed their government should do to enhance the role of women, be it to invest in the care economy so that women did not have to drop out of work or could return to it, access to finance, longer maternity leave or budgetary allocations, she said.