The National Commission for Women (NCW) launched the fourth phase of the Digital Shakti Campaign, a pan-India project on digitally empowering and skilling women and girls in cyberspace.

In line with its commitment to creating safe spaces for women and girls online, Digital Shakti 4.0 is focused on making women digitally skilled and aware to stand up against any illegal/inappropriate activity online. The NCW launched it in collaboration with CyberPeace Foundation and Meta.

The launch was graced by NCW Chairperson Rekha Sharma, Lt Gen BS Raju, UYSM, AVSM, YSM, Vice Chief of Army Staff (VCOAS); Major Vineet Kumar, Founder and Global President, CyberPeace Foundation; Rajiv Aggarwal, Director and Head of Public Policy, Facebook India (Meta), graced the occasion.

Addressing a gathering on the occasion, NCW Chairperson Rekha Sharma mentioned the continuous efforts of the commission for empowering women in every sphere across the nation.

She said, “This new phase will prove to be a milestone in ensuring safe cyberspace 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 the internet a safer space for them.”

Rajiv Aggarwal highlighted Meta’s efforts towards enabling safe online experience for women,”It has always been our endeavor 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.”

Major Vineet Kumar, Founder and Global President mentioned, “Given the accelerated digital adoption and cyber harms against vulnerable populations, government and fraternity members are working aggressively towards empowering and upskilling girls and women in cyberspace to protect them.

After receiving a tremendously positive response, we are glad to have partnered with NCW, Meta, Autobot Infosec and other collaborators. We look forward to significantly bridging the cybersecurity knowledge gap in India among vulnerable populations and reaching 1 million netizens in the next two years.”

The launch was followed by an interactive panel discussion on “Safe Spaces Online Combating Cyber-enabled Human Trafficking & Combating 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’s safety.