India has underscored the need to put enabling technologies in the hands of women, saying this will be a "game changer" if it is applied to its full potential in developing countries.
Addressing the first regular session of the UN Women Executive Board, India's Permanent Representative to the world body, Ambassador Asoke Mukerji, said serious challenges still remain in ensuring all-round empowerment of women.
Women continue to bear a disproportionate burden of global poverty and constitute nearly 70 per cent of the world's poor.
Despite estimates that they perform approximately 66 per cent of the world's workforce and produce approximately half the food, they earn only 10 per cent of income and own only a per cent of property, Mukerji said.
"Empowering women using enabling technologies can be a game changer if harnessed and applied to its full potential in developing countries," he said here yesterday.
If nations significantly expand the ambit of applying enabling technologies from beyond the domain of renewable energy to using enhanced ICT technologies in education, access to clean drinking water and healthcare, and decentralise their uses by transferring access and ownership of such technologies to rural women themselves, there would be a "structural transformation in the lives of millions of women", he said.
He cited the example of a project at the Barefoot College in Rajasthan, which has the slogan of "Train a grandmother, change the world".
The project works to train one village woman from nearly any corner of the developing world to become a solar engineer, he said.
