Advocacy statements

The Post 2015 Women’s Coalition is an international network of feminist, women’s rights, women’s development, grassroots and social justice organizations working, through advocacy and movement building, to challenge and re-frame the global development agenda.

Anita Gurumurthy, Executive Director, IT for Change, has been closely in dialogue with the Women's Major Group for the UN Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals , urging for the inclusion of information society concerns in the SDG discussions.

In June 2014, the High Power Committee examining amendments to the Karnataka Panchayat Raj Act 1993 invited IT for Change to provide inputs on the strategic use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), for strengthening Panchayat Raj Institutions. IT for Change, in its submission to the Committee, outlined key recommendations for shaping policy and programmatic directions in this area, building upon insights from the work of the Prakriye field centre.

The role of the Internet and of digital technologies in structuring our lived reality is beyond doubt. As a core facet of contemporary society, the Internet is central today to the enjoyment of our rights and freedoms. ITU statistics point to how the Internet has developed unevenly throughout the world - 77 percent of people from developed countries are Internet users, the corresponding number for the developing world being 31percent. This gap obviously has implications for development parameters in relation to education and work, and of course, for democracy and wellbeing.

As an axis of global power today, the Internet is key to aggrandising wealth and consolidating hegemony. The WSIS Principles heralded "connectivity (as) a central enabling agent"... in their vision for "an equitable, development oriented information society". More than ten years since the commitment to creating this new society through"universal, ubiquitous, equitable and affordable access to ICT infrastructure and services", remains a distant dream. In fact, the Internet has rapidly lost its
public good character, instead evolving as an enclosed commons at the service of global capitalism and rather ironically, as the next frontier of intellectual property control.
 

The Just Net Coalition (JNC) is a global network of civil society actors committed to an open, free, just and equitable Internet of which IT for Change is a founding member.


Founded in February 2014, the coalition engages on topics of the Internet and its governance, with the goal to promote democracy, human rights and social justice. JNC's founding principles and objectives are contained in the Delhi Declaration.

IT for Change is a civil society member of the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation (WGEC). In late 2012, the WGEC issued a questionnaire to the public, in a bid to elicit views on the World Summit on the Information Society's (WSIS) mandate regarding "enhanced cooperation" (appropriate mechanisms for governance of the global Internet). Find below, links to IT for Change's response to this questionnaire.

Read the response here.

IT for Change was asked to provide inputs in the area of e-governance and ICTD to UNDP as it was developing its plan for the programming period of 2013-18.

IT for Change with CIVIC Bangalore, KRIA Katte, and Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement condemn the proposal to amend the Right to Information Act that the government has undertaken in the monsoon session of the parliament. The amendment is to keep political parties out of its ambit. This challenges the basic principle of the Act which is to maintain transparency and accountability by the government, including the processes of governance which determines functioning of the government. The move of the government to amend the Act only goes to show that political parties are not willing to subject themselves to the transparency law and be open public scrutiny under the Act.