| Biographical Statement | Anita Gurumurthy is the founding member and executive director of IT for Change, an NGO located in Bangalore, India. Anita's core interests have included research and advocacy on development, with specific focus on areas such as gender, reproductive health, globalization, and the information society. At IT for Change, Anita is currently coordinator of a research and advocacy project (Information Society for the South) that looks at imperatives for a South-based information society discourse. She is the lead researcher of an Asia Pacific study supported by IDRC that seeks to map issues concerning women's empowerment in the information society in the region. Anita is currently engaged in a UNDP supported research to prepare policy briefs to engender ICT polices at national levels in the Asia Pacific region. She is also coordinator of IT for Change's UNDP and Government of India supported grassroots project that uses ICTs to empower women's collectives. Anita has been actively involved in advocacy around gender issues at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and has been on the Steering Committee of the WSIS Gender Caucus and its regional coordinator for Asia Pacific. She was also active as a part of the Informal Coalition on Financing " an advocacy platform comprising 7 NGOs - during the WSIS and engaged in advocacy on issues of financing and implementation. Anita is on the International Advisory Committee of BRIDGE - Gender and Development Information Service of IDS Sussex, and is the author of the BRIDGE Cutting Edge Pack on Gender and ICTs. She has also led the IT for Change research study "Bridging the Digital Gender Divide - Issues and Insights on ICT for Women's Economic Empowerment", for UNIFEM South Asia, and recently co-authored the chapter on gender for the forthcoming Karnataka Human Development Report 2, a UNDP and Government of Karnataka project. She also recently co-authored a research paper on the "Political Economy of the Information Society: A Southern View". Anita is also actively associated with DAWN, a network of women scholars and activists from the global South in DAWN's research and advocacy activities in the South Asia region and in DAWN's global advocacy work at WSIS. Anita has worked in various capacities with different organizations - as Research Consultant with the Centre for Public Policy, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, coordinating a national level study on "Public-Private partnerships in Health" and authoring a Trainers' Manual on Globalization; she has been the editor of HealthWatch Update, a policy advocacy newsletter on Women's Reproductive Health and Rights in India; and Research Associate, Women's Policy Research and Advocacy Unit, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India. |
| Vision of their contribution to the GA Strategy Council | In the emerging information society (IS), mainstreaming ICTs " which have a cross-cutting relationship with different development sectors - is an important challenge and an urgent imperative. An increased dialogue between the ICTD sector and 'traditional' development sectors has therefore been an area of considerable priority in my work. Further, years after Beijing, the agenda of mainstreaming gender in development still remains, and results on this front have been mixed. From the vantage of women's rights and gender equality, the trisection of gender, ICTs and development, translates into a very important but somewhat nebulous and hence challenging policy space. An important task for the GASC therefore, would be to develop conceptual and policy connections to local and grassroots developments in the IS, especially with respect to changes in gender relations across social institutions. The GASC space allows for consolidating my efforts to push for bridges between development, rights, gender justice and information society issues. |
