Reimagining the Indo-Pacific: Using an Inclusive Lens

As of 2023, South Asia has the largest gender gap in the world in terms of mobile ownership and mobile internet use – with women 15% less likely than men to own a mobile phone and 41% less likely to use mobile internet. At the same time, this gap is far less within East Asia & Pacific countries, with women only 2% less likely than men to own a mobile phone and 6% less likely to use mobile internet. Interestingly, the gender gap in mobile internet use in South Asia, and across LMICs overall, is largely driven by India.

Under a joint initiative by The Auswärtiges Amt (Federal Foreign Office) Germany and Kubernein Initiative, Aarushi Gupta from Digital Futures Lab has authored a policy brief on gender and digital governance in the Indo-Pacific region. The larger initiative, focused on critically examining gender mainstreaming in the region's policy landscape, aims to explore future pathways that may be particularly relevant to Indo-German bilateral engagement.

In this brief, Aarushi underscores the many forms of exclusion that women, girls, and non-binary individuals continue to face in a world that is being rapidly digitalised and how such gender asymmetries differ across countries in the region. In the brief, she unpacks the various imaginaries around digital development in countries like India and South Korea and how, in many of these grand visions, the experiences of women and LGBTQIA+ individuals remain invisible.

Aarushi concludes the brief by identifying an array of pan-regional opportunities for gender mainstreaming in digital governance - advocating for multi-stakeholder models and strategic blueprints with a clear set of gender-integrated policy commitments. She also highlights the various ways in which the German government, with its 'feminist foreign policy', can play a pivotal role in the region - through funding research and strengthening institutional capacities.