I have been working with the United Nations for the last 12 years, and capacity-building activities are often critical components of development projects around the world. Capacity-building activities aim to enhance individuals, organizations, or communities’ knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve their goals, sustain development efforts, and build resilience.

At the same time, evaluating capacity-building activities is crucial for assessing their effectiveness and impact because it helps identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. Moreover, evaluation is critical in promoting accountability for donors and learning for implementing partners to understand why and to what extent capacity development activities were achieved and analyze the impact of the results.

In collaboration with Dr. Matteo Lucchetti (Director of CYBER 4.0, Italian National Cybersecurity Competence Center, and Member of the Advisory Board, GFCE) I started to explore how cyber security projects can mainstream gender and how evaluation of these projects can be used as a tool for reducing gender-based violence because evaluation is not only a driver of positive change in terms of gender equality but also the process itself that empowers the stakeholders involved in cybersecurity capacity development activities.

In our research paper, we presented how cyber violence disproportionately affects women and girls of all ages and has strong psychological, behavioural, and economic consequences. Women and girls are also more exposed to experience cyberstalking through abusive language, harassment, denigrating images, and aggressive behaviour in online spaces. While there is an increased prevalence of online violence against women and girls globally, especially during and after the Covid pandemic, there are notable regional differences, where women and girls in developing countries are more exposed to online violence compared to the prevalence rates in developed countries. In most cases, online gender violence is due to unequal access to digital education, lack of legal framework, and underreporting, due either to the lack of knowledge on what is to be considered criminal conduct or to the decision taken by the victims not to expose themselves publicly. As a result, there is a lack of reliable statistics, even at the country level, on cybercrimes against women and girls that are actually needed to guide the policymakers toward adopting a regulatory framework that could finally address cyberviolence against women and girls.

At the same time, despite the increased prevalence of cyber violence against women and girls, policy attention is still limited, and gender and cybersecurity are the new field of development interventions to support women and girls globally. With reference to UN Women’s regional programme on Women Peace and Cybersecurity, our research paper sought to answer how gender-focus capacity-building efforts can contribute to preventing cyber violence against women and girls and further support national gender-focused cybersecurity laws and policies. Findings confirm that capacity development, including a cyber capacity focused on women and girls, is an enabling factor in the gender equality framework, as capacity development is important for developing legislation. Moreover, increasing awareness and capacities on gender-responsive cybersecurity among national partners, including government, civil societies, and academia, has an impact on accelerating national-level processes further and strengthening the cybersecurity field. However, there is still a lack of national data on the prevalence of online gender-based violence, especially in developing countries, which might limit effective national policy development. Therefore, promoting gender-focused capacity development activities and further work with national counterparts is needed to deepen the current understanding of the gendered dynamics of online space and the development of gender-focused legislation to prevent violence against women.