Women's access to digital technologies and the development of their abilities to use and take advantage of such technology for empowerment and exercise of rights is a way to reduce the deepening of the digital gender gap in Latin America. The photo shows a training course carried out with this aim by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) with women in the region. CREDIT: APC

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Mar 7 2023 (IPS)

The digital gender gap is multifactorial in Latin America and as long as countries fail to address discrimination against women, inequality will be reflected in the digital space, excluding them from access to opportunities and enjoyment of their rights.

This is what Karla Velazco, political advocacy coordinator for the women’s rights program of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), an international network of civil society organizations that promotes the strategic use of information and communications technologies in Latin America, Asia and Africa, told IPS:

Poverty in the region affects 32 percent of the population, but with a clear gender and ethnic bias, with higher rates among women and indigenous people and blacks, according to a study by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

This disadvantage, the study underlines, impacts them by reducing their access to, use, management and control of new technologies, to the detriment of their development.

Velazco is also part of the Inter-American Telecommunications Commission’s (CITEL) Permanent Consultative Committee, where she promotes women’s right to access the internet and new technologies in general, she explained by videoconference from her office in Mexico City.

On the occasion of the commemoration of International Women’s Day, whose theme this year is “For an inclusive digital world: Innovation and technology for gender equality”, the expert drew attention to the lack of centralized and updated data on this topic that would enable governments to move forward with well-defined policies.

The ECLAC study, entitled “Digitalization of Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Urgent action for a transformative recovery, with equality” and published in 2022, reports that four out of 10 women in the region do not have access to the internet, based on data provided by 11 countries.

But Velazco said this figure does not provide qualitative information nor does it address the gap between urban and rural environments.

“There is no measurement of how women are using technology and how it affects their lives. For example, we see a lot of online gender-based violence (OGBV) but there are almost no reports on this,” she said.

Karla Velazco, from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), an international network of civil society organizations, says it is important to have up-to-date data on the different aspects of the digital gender gap in Latin America, so that countries can design appropriate public policies and take action. CREDIT: Courtesy Karla Velazco

In any case, the figure served as a reference point to assume a commitment to reduce the digital gender gap, during a regional consultation held in February to reach a position on the issue to be presented at the 67th meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) taking place Mar. 6-17 at United Nations headquarters in New York.

The 11 countries that provided data for the study were Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay.

Velazco argued that women do not completely adopt the new technologies because as long as structural gender inequalities persist in labor, educational, economic and social areas, intertwined with discrimination based on ethnicity, economic status, sexual orientation or age, these will be replicated in the digital space.

“As it is made up of different factors, the digital gender gap is very difficult to measure, but it is a responsibility that States have to assume so that women are not excluded from technological advances and innovations and, on the contrary, benefit from it for their empowerment and exercise of rights,” she said.

Elizabeth Mendoza, a Peruvian lawyer from the non-governmental organization Hiperderecho, said that in Peru it is very difficult to report online gender-based violence. In an interview at the NGO’s office in Lima, she showed IPS the Tecnoresistencias digital space created to promote safe browsing for girls and women and prevent violations of their rights. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

The difficulties of reporting online gender-based violence

Elizabeth Mendoza is a lawyer and legal coordinator of the non-governmental Hiperderecho, a Peruvian institution that has worked for 10 years on rights and freedoms in technology.

“There are disadvantages in the use and enjoyment of the internet. When browsing we come across situations or people who try to violate our rights by taking advantage of technology and this is what we know as digital gender violence,” she told IPS in an interview at the NGO’s headquarters in Lima.

In 2018 Legislative Decree 1410 was passed in Peru, which recognizes four types of criminal online gender-based violence: harassment, sexual harassment, sexual blackmail and dissemination of audiovisual content and images through technological means.

Hiperderecho analyzed the efficiency of the law and found that people do not know how to report such crimes and that the authorities have fallen far short in enforcing the legislation.

“Many people experience OGBV and don’t know it’s a reportable crime; in cases in which the complaint has been made, it is not received by the police and the prosecutor’s office does not have the authority to adequately investigate and prosecute the case,” said the lawyer.

This situation is due to lack of training for the authorities in understanding OGBV and how to handle cases from a gender perspective, and with respect to using technology to investigate and put together a case.

“What generally happens is that they tell you: if he’s bothering you, block him; if you have a problem, close your account. In this type of crime, the idea is to act diligently and quickly because the aggressors delete the content, the message, the account and we can be left without evidence,” Mendoza said.

In the cases assisted by Hiperderecho, the common denominator is the re-victimization of the complainant. “In the middle of a hearing we met a defense lawyer who said: why are you making so much trouble if my defendant has a future ahead of him, this is just a case of harassment and he is sorry. It is difficult to report online gender-based violence in Peru,” she commented.

To help protect the rights of girls and women in the use of the digital space, Hiperderecho has created the Tecnoresistencias self-care center that provides guidance and information on how to identify online gender-based violence, how to fight it and how to proceed and report it.

The center provides self-care guides, explanations of the different kinds of OGBV, and methods available for reporting it. It also answers queries.

“At first they only used the cell phone to talk; now it’s a means to face the poverty that worsened in the pandemic,” said Rosy Santiz, a Mayan woman from the town of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, talking about women embroiderers and weavers who, through the use of technology, have been able to weather the economic and social crisis they have been facing. CREDIT: Courtesy of Rosy Santiz

Using mobile applications to weather the crisis

On the other side of the coin, the use of the internet and access to new technologies made it possible to weather the serious economic and social crisis that COVID-19 accentuated among a group of Mayan indigenous women in the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

“The pandemic made it very difficult for us, we were not making progress in access to communication because there is little internet here in San Cristóbal de las Casas and we needed to learn,” said Rosy Santiz, a Mayan woman who is a trainer and promotes rights.

She is a member of the K’inal Antsetik (“land of women” in the Tzeltal indigenous language) Training and Skills Center for Women. Created in 2014, the center supports collectives and a network of cooperatives of women embroiderers and weavers.

“We knew how to use the cell phone, but to keep our jobs we had to learn other programs like Zoom. It was difficult, but it was the only way to be able to communicate and work from home. We learned how to continue holding our meetings and how to coordinate to continue disseminating information and training, because in the pandemic we also continued to share our experiences,” Santiz said.

In the communities where the women who make up the collectives and the cooperative live, there is little internet signal, so they decided to train them in the use of the WhatsApp application. The members of the board of directors who live in San Cristóbal de las Casas receive the orders from clients and channel them to the women embroiderers and weavers, sending the specifications and photographs over WhatsApp.

“At first they only used the cell phone to talk; now it’s a means to face the poverty that worsened in the pandemic, it is one of the aspects that we take advantage of with respect to technology,” she said.

Excerpt:

Map of broadband speed in Latin America in late 2014, according to a report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Credit: ECLAC

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 28 2015 (IPS)

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will include targets for information and communication technologies, such as strengthening the Internet. And Latin America will be behind from the start in aspects that are key to increasing its educational and medical uses, bolster security and expand bandwidth.

That lag is especially visible in the construction of Internet exchange points (IXPs) and the upgrade of the Internet protocol from IP version 4 (IPv4) to IP version 6 (IPv6).

In the first case, the construction of neutral IXPs allows faster handling of greater data flows, because they circulate in the national territory without the need for access outside the country. This reduces costs and improves the quality of service.

And IPv6 provides virtually infinite address space, better security, mobile computing, better quality service, and an improved design for real-time multimedia traffic. That represents enormous potential for social applications in areas like health and education.

But Lacier Dias, a professor with the Brazilian consultancy VLSM, said the advances made in his country have fallen short.

“Investment and infrastructure are lacking,” he told IPS. “It’s a challenge to expand it to the entire country, because of the size of the territory and the distance. Another challenge is offering broadband to all users.”

In the region, Brazil has the highest number of IXPs: 31, according to the 2014 study “Expansion of regional infrastructure for the interconnection of Internet traffic in Latin America”, drawn up by the Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF), a regional development bank.

The progress made in Brazil is due to a public policy that foments this infrastructure, combined with an effective multisectoral agency, the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI), which administers the country’s network with the participation of the government, companies, academia and civil society.

In 2004, the CGI launched the “traffic exchange points” initiative to open more IXPs to connect universities and telecommunications and internet service providers.

The 31 IXPs cover at least 16 of Brazil’s 26 states, with a peak period aggregate traffic of 250 GB. An additional 16 potential IXP points have been identified, while at least 47 are under evaluation.

Growth of Internet users in Latin America, country by country, between 2006 and 2013. Credit: ECLAC

In Argentina, the first IXP was opened in 1998 and 11 now operate in five provinces. They connect more than 80 network operators through a hub in Buenos Aires. Total traffic is over eight GB per second.

The hub is managed by the Argentine Chamber of Databases and Online Services, which represents Internet, telephony and online content providers.

Mexico opened its only IXP in 2014, administered by the Consortium for Internet Traffic Exchange, made up of the University Corporation for Internet Development and Internet service providers.

The users of these sites include Internet providers, educational systems and state governments.

The 17 SDGs will be adopted at a Sep. 25-27 summit of heads of state and government at United Nations headquarters in New York, with 169 specific targets to be reached by 2030.

The ninth SDG is “Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation, and foster innovation”.

And target 9c is “Significantly increase access to information and communications technology and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020.”

In Latin America, unlike in Europe, regional IXPs do not yet operate to aggregate traffic between countries.

According to the “State of broadband in Latin America and the Caribbean 2015” report launched in July by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), nearly half of the region’s population uses Internet.

Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, in that order, are the countries with the highest proportion of Internet users, while Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua have the lowest, in a region marked by an enormous gap in access between rural and urban areas.

With respect to broadband, or high-speed Internet access according to U.S. Federal Communications Commission standards, the ECLAC study indicates that Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Mexico report the largest number of connections over 10 MB per second, while Peru, Costa Rica, Venezuela and Bolivia have the smallest number.

Broadband speed in fixed and mobile connections in several countries of Latin America, compared to selected In the industrialised North. Credit: ECLAC

Meanwhile, the highest level of consumption of mobile broadband devices is found in Costa Rica, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela, and the lowest in Paraguay, Guatemala, Peru and Nicaragua.

“The region must become more interconnected, and in order for that to happen, regional traffic and IXPs must be fomented,” David Ocampos, Paraguay’s national secretary of Information and Communication Technologies, told IPS. “There is a lot to be done in terms of traffic exchange. There are no hubs. Infrastructure has to be built, with regional rings.”

Paraguay is now opening its first IXP.

Only 30 percent of the content consumed in Latin America is produced in one of the countries in the region, which can be attributed to the availability of broadband and to infrastructure like IXPs and IPv6, according to the study “The ecosystem and digital economy in Latin America” by the Telecommunications Studies Center of Latin America (CET.LA).

Of the 100 most popular sites in Latin America, only 26 were created in the region, although consumption of cyber traffic per user rose 62 percent in the last few years, higher than the global increase.

In the countries of Latin America, 150 billion dollars have been invested in telecoms in the past seven years, but another 400 billion are needed over the next seven years to close the digital gap.

CAF proposes the construction of three inter-regional IXPs, in Brazil, Panama and Peru, as well as three kinds of national connections in the rest of the region, to be included in the inter-regional ones.

With respect to IPv6, which was launched globally in 2012, Latin America and the Caribbean are slowly moving towards that standard.

In June 2014 the region officially ran out of the IPv4 address space it had been assigned.

Last year, Brazil had nearly 54 percent of the assigned regional space; Mexico 10 percent; Argentina 10 percent; Chile nearly six percent; and Colombia nearly four percent, according to the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC).

In the IPv6 protocol, Brazil leads the list, with 70 percent, followed by Argentina with nine percent; Colombia three percent; Chile 2.5 percent; and Mexico 2.3 percent.

“With IPv6 all Internet users can be covered, with third generation mobile networks. As of this year, Brazil is only buying technological equipment that supports IPv6,” said Dias of Brazil.

“Everyone is looking to IPv6; it’s the natural Internet upgrade. With more IXPs comes the step to IPv6. Broadband drives adoption of IPv6 and allows an increase in users,” said Campos of Paraguay.

ECLAC indicates that in 2013, fixed broadband penetration stood at nine percent in the region, and mobile at 30 percent. In 16 of the 18 countries studied there is more mobile broadband penetration than fixed.

The Union of South American Nations, which brings together 12 countries, is building a ring of more than 10,000 km of fiber optic to link the members of the bloc.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes