The 3rd Leadership Meeting of the International Taskforce for Women and ICTs (ITF) held on December 9th and 10th in Kuala Lumpur, brought together a small number of high level leaders to move forward on the outcomes of the Paris  Networking meeting of the ITF hosted at UNESCO in November 2006. The meeting was organized by the International Taskforce for Women and ICTs (ITF) under the leadership of Claudia Morrell, ITF Founding Chair, co-hosted by the UN Global Alliance for ICT for Development (UN GAID) and under the patronage of the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP).

As a result of the Leadership Meetings and consultations carried out in Baltimore, Paris and Kuala Lumpur a broad consensus has emerged that there is a need to continue the global , transparent, inclusive, multi-stakeholder dialog focused on bringing about a major breakthrough in the field of women's participation in the knowledge-based economy.

Participants agreed on ' A Bold new global multi-stakeholder strategy to bring about a major break-through in regard to women's participation in the knowledge-based economy' and setting up of Ten Regional Centers based on a global framework.

The ITF's basic aim with setting up of the Ten Regional Centers is to:

• Implement policy through coordinated direct action
• Communicate best practices across cultures
• Accelerate and scale metrics for measurable impact
• Leverage and escalate global collaborative research and
• Leverage funding and collaboratively develop new services based on multi-stakeholder needs .

The strategy focuses efforts, shares models/best practices globally and lets them get implemented in a regional context. The focus of the strategy is on

Five key tools:

• Policy and Actions
• Research and Impact Metrics
• Dissemination and Communication
• Resource and Service Development
• Context and Culture

Four target areas:

• Education
• Entrepreneurship
• Workforce
• Leadership
  

The strategy is based on

• Multi-stakeholder and multi-sector leadership
• Multi-layered international, national, regional and local focuses.

The set-up is planned in three phases:

1. Phase I: 2007-2008: Set-up of 3 regional centres
2. Phase II: 2008-2009: Set-up of additional 3(4) centres
3. Phase III: 2009-2010: Set up of last 3(4) centres

The full documentation of the ITF Leadership meeting

The event was arranged in connection with the Third Global Knowledge Conference - GK3 which brought together 1766 participants from 135 countries (38% of them women)  - visionaries, international leaders, practitioners and policy-makers to engage on the theme of Emerging People, Emerging Markets, Emerging Technologies.

Through the co-operation between the International Taskforce and GKP the entire GK3 conference (daily 2 plenaries and around 56 different workshops) was mainstreamed - through the participation of the ITF board members in different workshops - both in regard to preparations, presentations, participations and evaluation of the event.

The seminars with the key focus on ITF issues were:

• EP1: Engendering the Knowledge Society: Measuring Women's Participation
• EP6: Creating a New Strategy for Gender in the Information Society - Empowering Women in ICT
• EP8: Gender Evaluation Methodology for ICT4D Practitioners
• EP11: Empowering Grassroots Women for Good Governance through Community Media
• EP19: Learning from Stories Shared by Empowered "Homepreneurs" and Tele-Workers in the Information Economy.

Meeting the needs of GKP the ITF led by WIGSAT developed for the GK3 conference a Gender experts database .