The Women ICT Frontier Initiative (WIFI) flagship programme aims to promote women’s entrepreneurship in Asia and the Pacific through enhancing capabilities of women entrepreneurs in ICT and entrepreneurship so that they and their enterprises can become more productive, and hopefully grow and be sustainable so that they can actively contribute to community development as well as to the local and national economy.
The WIFI programme was officially launched on 9-10 June, 2016 in Korea in a regional forum that examined the state-of-the-art of ICTD capacity building in Asia and the Pacific to develop the appropriate regional and national capacity development in support of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The overall goal of WIFI is to create socially and economically-empowered women through ICT-enabled entrepreneurship.
WIFI is expected to achieve the following key objectives:
A comprehensive and integrated ICT and entrepreneurship training programme was developed for two target audiences: 1) women entrepreneurs; and 2) government leaders and policymakers.
WIFI employs a two-track approach to building capacities of women entrepreneurs:
In addition to women entrepreneurs, WIFI targets government leaders and policymakers to strengthen their capacities in creating the enabling environment for ICT-empowered women entrepreneurship.
Technical assistance and advice are provided to programme partners including governments, training institutes, CSOs and relevant women organizations in areas such as WIFI roll-out and institutionalization in human resource development framework.
The primary objective of this module is to introduce the key concepts of: empowerment, women’s empowerment and its barriers and enablers in present times, information and communication technology (ICT) and its challenges and opportunities in promoting women’s empowerment, and the Sustainable Development Goals related to achieving women’s empowerment.
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The primary objective of this module is to introduce the key concepts of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. It also focuses on the global and regional status of women entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship’s relations to women’s empowerment, the barriers and enablers faced by women entrepreneurs, and the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in women’s entrepreneurship.
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The primary objective of this module is to introduce existing and aspiring women entrepreneurs to business planning, and to the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools for business planning. The module provides fundamental business planning concepts, analytical tools and ICT applications for business planning.
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This module is a sequel to Module W1: Planning a Business Using ICT. The primary objective of this module is to introduce existing and aspiring women entrepreneurs to the set up and management of a business, and the ways in which Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can help in the process.
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The objective of this module is to inform policymakers and support their policymaking skills with gender-related knowledge to create an enabling environment for ICT-empowered women entrepreneurs
read moreWIFI has reached 12 countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region, including Armenia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Kyrgyzstan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. WIFI has also been introduced in both the CIS and ASEAN Subregions and has been localized in 8 languages.
