Federal Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunication Shaza Khawaja chaired a Steering Committee meeting on Pakistan’s Digital Inclusion Strategy, bringing together a broad coalition of government bodies, regulatory authorities, private sector partners, and international organizations to align priorities and accelerate implementation of the country’s digital inclusion agenda. The meeting, held under the banner of Her Digital Pakistan, underlined the government’s continued commitment to ensuring that women and girls remain central to the country’s digital transformation rather than being left on the margins of a rapidly expanding digital economy.
The Steering Committee meeting was attended by representatives from the National Commission on the Status of Women, the National Commission for Human Rights, the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Jazz, the Higher Education Commission, GSMA, UNESCO, the Global Digital Inclusion Partnership, and PTA, which led the support efforts for the session. The breadth of stakeholders reflects the cross-sectoral nature of the digital inclusion challenge, which cuts across connectivity, education, policy, financial access, and social norms simultaneously. The Steering Committee’s mandate includes embedding project outcomes into institutional strategies, ensuring sustainability beyond individual project cycles, and tracking gender-disaggregated results in real time.
Pakistan has made measurable progress on digital gender inclusion in recent years. The gender gap in mobile internet usage declined to around 25 percent from 36 to 38 percent over the past year, while more than 800,000 digital wallets were opened by women during the Ramzan digital payments initiative. The government has also distributed around 7 million free subscriber identity module cards to underserved women to improve connectivity and enable access to digital and financial services. Integrating women into Pakistan’s digital economy is critical to formalizing the largely informal sector, which constitutes about 50 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, with expanding women’s participation expected to strengthen workforce supply, enhance per capita productivity, and build a sustainable talent pipeline. The Her Digital Pakistan initiative sits within a broader policy architecture that includes the Digital Nation Pakistan Act, passed in January 2025, and the Digitalization for Women Economic Empowerment project, a four-year initiative running from 2024 to 2028 funded by the Korea International Cooperation Agency. Pakistan also assumed the chairmanship of the Digital Cooperation Organization in February 2026, with Minister Khawaja committing to prioritize digital inclusion and gender equity as core themes of Pakistan’s leadership term at the international body. The latest Steering Committee meeting signals that the government is moving beyond policy articulation toward active implementation tracking, with all participating departments and organizations directed to ensure measurable outcomes that reflect the real-world impact of the strategy on women and girls across the country.
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