Dr Nancy Hafkin
Former coordinator, African Information Society Initiative, UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).
Dr Nancy Hafkin has been working to promote information and communications technology in Africa and other developing areas, with particular emphasis on gender, for four decades. She was chief of research in the program for women and development at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in Addis Ababa — the first international women and development program in the world. She subsequently headed the ECA program to Promote Information Technology for Development in Africa, where she worked to establish the African Information Society Initiative that promoted the importance of information technology to African governments.
The Association for Progressive Communications in 2000 established the annual Nancy Hafkin Communications Prize competition. In 2012 she was in the first group of inductees into the Internet Society Hall of Fame, in the category of “Global Connectors.” In 2015 she was received the UNWomen-ITU GEM-Tech Global Achiever Award. The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park (UK) features a poster of Nancy and her work in its new Women in Computing Gallery that aims to inspire more girls to take up computing as a career.
#SpeakerPreview: Read interview with Nancy on Wired "Nancy Hafkin Brought Internet to Africa, Now She’s Tackling the Tech Gender Divide"
#SpeakerPreview: Read article featuring Nancy in Huffington Post "Dancing in the Storm: Leveling the Digital Gender Divide One Woman at a Time"
#SpeakerPreview: Read interview with Nancy on The Crunch "On International Women’s Day, Thoughts On Gender And STEM"