National Commission for Women launches 4th phase of Digital Shakti

New Delhi [India], November 15 : The National Commission for Women (NCW) Tuesday launched the fourth phase of the Digital Shakti Campaign, a pan-India project on digitally empowering and skilling women and girls in cyberspace, run in collaboration with CyberPeace Foundation and Meta.
In line with its commitment to creating safe spaces for women and girls online, the Commission, along with partners Meta and CyberPeace Foundation has launched Digital Shakti 4.0, which is focused on making women digitally skilled and aware to stand up against any illegal/inappropriate activity online.
Ms Rekha Sharma, Chairperson, NCW, Major Vineet Kumar, Founder and Global President, CyberPeace Foundation, Shri Rajiv Aggarwal, Director and Head of Public Policy, Meta India, Lt Gen B.S. Raju, UYSM, AVSM, YSM, Vice Chief of Army Staff were present during the inaugural ceremony.
During the inaugural address, Rekha Sharma, Chairperson, NCW, mentioned the continuous efforts of the Commission for empowering women in every sphere across the nation. "This new phase will prove to be a milestone in ensuring safe cyber spaces for women. Digital Shakti has been accelerating the digital participation of women and girls by training them to use technology to their advantage and to keep themselves safe online. I believe the project will continue to contribute towards the larger goal of fighting cyber violence against women and girls and make internet a safer space for them," she said.
While Rajiv Aggarwal highlighted Meta's efforts towards enabling safe online experience for women, "It has always been our endeavour to create an online experience for women which is not only enabling but is also safe. Digital Shakti has been an enabler for more than 3 lakh women and with the launch of phase 4, we aim to sensitize more than 1 million women across India on how to be safe online so as to derive the best experience and opportunities that digital platforms have to offer.
The launch was followed by an interactive panel discussion on "Safe Spaces Online Combatting Cyber-enabled Human Trafficking & Combatting Other forms of Online Violence" in order to provide keen opinions from experts from the Industry, Government, and Academia to address the issue of online women safety from all tangents and provide the whole approach to ensure better women safety online.
Padma Shri Sunitha Krishnan, General Secretary, Prajwala, Mr Ashutosh Pande, Senior Research Officer, NCW, Pavan Duggal, Advocate Supreme Court of India and Advisor, CPF, Veerendra Mishra, AIG, SISF, Madhya Pradesh Police and Advisor, NCW, Preeti Chauhan, Director-Operations, CPF participated in the discussion.
Digital Shakti started in June 2018 to help women across the nation to raise the awareness level on the digital front, to build resilience, and fight cybercrime in the most effective ways. Through this project, over 3 Lakh women across India have been made aware of cyber safety tips and tricks, reporting & redressal mechanisms, data privacy and usage of technology for their benefit.
The third phase of the program was started in March 2021 with the Launch at Leh by NCW Chairperson Ms Rekha Sharma in the presence of Lieutenant Governor Shri Radha Krishna Mathur and Jamyang Tsering Namgyal, MP, Ladakh. In the third phase, a Resource Center was also developed under the project to provide information on all the avenues of reporting in case a woman faces any cybercrime.