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The world marked International Women’s Day yesterday, a moment when all of us celebrate the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day, first commemorated in 1911, also marks a call to action for accelerating women’s equality.

On this day apart from celebrating women’s achievements, governments and support organisations educate and raise awareness for women’s equality, call for positive change advancing women and lobby for accelerated gender parity.

This year the theme is “DigitALL Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality.” The theme, according to the UN serves to remind humanity of the immense potential that digital transformation holds for accelerating gender equality and women’s empowerment. It however, recognises that digital technologies also pose risks for repeating and amplifying existing patterns of gender inequality. As the world is evolving to become more digital, the world body adds, the globe must ensure we can keep up the pace and unleash the potential of women and girls to become active agents of change in this transformation. Digital technologies need to be used to accelerate progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and gender equality, not to set us further back.

It is encouraging that the focus for International Women’s Day and Women’s Month is on harnessing technology to advance gender equality. The world now revolves on digital technology, no one can function effectively without a mobile phone, social media, multimedia and related stuff.

We want women in our country to develop more interest in using the digital technologies to uplift themselves socially, politically and economically. They can secure technology jobs, they can be developers of the technologies and they can empower others through businesses revolving around digital technologies. They, too, can empower themselves politically through diligent utilisation of digital tools.

We don’t think women in our country are dominant in the foregoing, as they generally lag behind men in basically all spheres of life. However, the focus of International Women’s Day this year must ignite that fire in them for them to advance themselves by utilising the digital tools to bridge the gender gap.

Our country is moving towards a general election in the next few months. We urge as many women as possible to step forward and seek election, using digital tools most efficiently in the process. We know how social media has become a huge opportunity for politicians to campaign for leadership roles. Let our women take advantage so they can compete head-to-head with men for election into those positions.

But politics is not the only endeavour in life. As indicated earlier, abundant opportunities are available for the womenfolk to utilise digital technologies as a purely economic empowerment route. That way, we would have made a step forward as a country to meet SDGs and the imperative of gender equality.

However, we note, as the UN does, that digital technologies can be used to harm as well, to demoralise and to perpetuate the marginalisation of women. Some men are the culprits but some women are as well. We ask men not to abuse the tools to do women down just because they are women “who must know their place.” That we denounce in the strongest of terms. Be that as it may, it will be useful too if women got prepared to fight for gender equality, to use social media, multimedia to actually fight instead of thinking moral suasion will always work.  It does, but if it doesn’t, we are confident that a good number of women now know their rights and are prepared to fight for themselves.

Our country will be better if we had more Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiris, Mabel Chinomonas, more Divine Ndhlukulas, more Jesimin Chipikas and others. Women of substance who use all tools available, including digital ones to compete and rise.