This annual award seeks to create a platform for advancing women's meaningful engagement with ICTs and their role as decision-makers and producers within this sector. In considering "gender equality mainstreaming" we are looking not only at ICT, government and development actors that are mainstreaming gender equality perspectives within their work, but also ICT and gender advocates that are seeking to "mainstream" gender equality into a larger context.
2015 Global Achievers
H.E. Anusha Rehman Khan, Minister of State for IT and Telecommunications, Pakistan
Her Excellency Anusha Rehman Khan is the Minister of State for Information Technology and Telecommunications for Pakistan. She has initiated a number of projects and programmes that have had a profound impact on the ICT sector in Pakistan – in particular, she has enhanced the role of women in the sector and enabled women in general to benefit from ICT. The initiatives include a special program for disadvantaged girls, which gives girls access to learning computer science and economic opportunities, and a startup incubator program, which offers mentorship, commercial, legal and financial help for young people and young women in particular. H.E. Khan has also undertaken several other policy and legislative initiatives with direct relevance to furthering women's empowerment.
H.E. Pamela Hamamoto, Ambassador, US Mission Geneva 
Her Excellency Ambassador Pamela Hamamoto, Permanent Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva, has mobilized International Geneva around new collaborative initiatives focused on women and girls. The Future She Deserves, launched by the US Mission in 2015, generates creative problem-solving in the areas of gender-based violence, adolescent girls' health, economic empowerment, and women's leadership. Ambassador Hamamoto is a driving force behind Geneva Gender Champions, a leadership network bringing together male and female decision-makers who, through specific and concrete commitments, elevate women's issues to the top of the global agenda. Ambassador Hamamoto, who started her career as a civil engineer, is dedicated to promoting STEM education for girls and young women and highlighting the critical importance of bridging the gender gap in ICT.
Dr Nancy Hafkin, Senior Associate, Women in Global Science and Technology,
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Nancy Hafkin has been a role model and an active champion on gender equality and ICTs for decades including in global fora and bodies and through research and publications. She joined the African Training and Research Center for Women at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the first regional international regional program on women in development, where she worked to promote data and research on African women in development. Challenged by developments in information technology, she started the ECA program on promoting information technology for development and the African Information Society Initiative (eight years before the World Summit on the Information Society). Her work on gender and technology over several decades promoted an awareness of gender issues, countered the view of gender-neutral technology and encouraged the collection and analysis of sex-disaggregated data on women. In 2000 the Association for Progressive Communications established the Nancy Hafkin Prize for innovation in communications in Africa, and, in 2012, Nancy was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.
