UN Women Joins the Digital Public Goods Alliance!

UN Women has joined the Digital Public Goods Alliance! As a member of the DPGA, UN Women has pledged its commitment to SDG 5 on gender equality by facilitating the discovery, development, use, and investment in digital public goods.

“Over the past century, we have learnt that the physical infrastructure we build is not gender neutral. As we embark on developing digital public infrastructure, we need to understand how the key components of digital ID, finance and data exchange can deliver real benefits for women and girls in all their diversity, throughout their lives. UN Women will focus on the power of digital public goods and infrastructure to transform the spaces where most women and girls experience justice”, the UN Women Deputy Executive Director for Normative Support, UN System Coordination and Programme Results, Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, explained.

“We are thrilled to welcome UN Women to the DPGA. Their work on leveraging DPGs to address the gender divide, child marriage, and gender justice helps to make tangible the human impact of DPGs. Women and girls represent half of all users, but if the digital systems that govern their lives are not built considering their needs, capabilities, and realities, they will be left behind. UN Women’s commitment to ensuring that the voices of women and girls are included helps deliver on the promise of DPGs to accelerate attainment of the sustainable development goals, and we are excited to have them as part of our community” added Liv Marte Nordhaug, CEO, Digital Public Goods Alliance Secretariat.

Through their membership to the DPGA, UN Women will undertake the following roadmap activities:

Roadmap Activity 1: Build the Marriage registration component of OpenCRVS, a recognized DPG for supporting civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS), as a way to ensure that civil law rights are accorded to women and to prevent the marriage of girls. 

Roadmap Activity 2: Integrate an age verification safeguard process for digital CRVS systems and/or national social protection programmes to adapt and utilize in their systems. This addresses the large number of child marriages that are not able to be registered and so cannot be prevented through Activity 1.

Roadmap Activity 3: Adapt a DPG to connect girls at risk of child marriage with paralegal/ legal assistance, health and other services. This includes the discovery and accreditation of service providers as well as language interpretation for key information on rights and referrals to relevant services, including social protection programmes. 

Roadmap Activity 4: Mobilise, communicate and advocate for DPGs in support of Gender Justice through convening discussions on the gendered considerations in designing and implementing digital public goods to build safe, inclusive and interoperable digital public infrastructure for women and girls. The challenges and recommendations for harnessing the benefits of DPG for DPI for the benefit of diverse women and children will be published in 2025.

Click here to learn more about UN Women’s work in championing gender equality, the empowerment of women, and their DPGA membership, including read their full announcement.

Visit the DPGA’s Roadmap to learn more about UN Women’s efforts to support digital public goods.