April 28, 2002	Sunday	Safar 14, 1423

KARACHI, April 27: Sindh minister for education, Prof Anita Ghulam Ali, said on Saturday that the present government was encouraging more and more women to join the field of information technology.

She was addressing a seminar on “Women in Information Technology( WIT) organized by WIT, at the Agha Khan University Hospital auditorium here.

“We are looking forward to a change and that change will only come about with women’s participation,” she said.

The minister said that IT had become one of the basic building blocks of the modern society, but unfortunately no attention had been paid to promotion of technology that would make women’s lives less hazardous and more productive.

The minister informed that school curricula would be revised to include the recent developments in the field of IT. She added that two hundred computer labs were being set up in the colleges throughout the province and 1500 new IT schoolteachers would soon be recruited.

Appreciating the efforts of WIT, an organization of women working in the field of IT, she said that such an initiative would help reduce gender disparity. The minister said the government would provide all possible help to those women who were interested in IT business or wanted to enhance their skills. “IT is a great tool to empower women,” she added.

Earlier, chief executive (CE) of the Enabling Technologies, Jehan Ara, addressing the seminar on behalf of WIT, said that talented women of Pakistan had proved wrong that belief that women could not pursue career in IT.

“Women in IT are doing a fantastic job and the saying that technology is not women-friendly is not correct,” she added.

Ms Ara said that women were more successful in IT careers because they were more responsible and they paid more attention.

She said that in a country with low literacy rate like ours, a lot of improvement could be done through the web audio content and women could take that task in their hands by using their leisure time at home.

“It will make your life easy, you can do a lot of work sitting in home just through a laptop,” she said. She suggested that the audio web content in local languages- Sindhi, Punjabi and others-will help reduce illiteracy.

General manager of the SME Bank, Tariq Baloch, said that SMEs were the backbone of any country’s economy, but in our county the sector had been neglected for years.

The present government, he said, was making all-out efforts to create a conducive environment for business, particularly for SMEs. He said that earlier banks were hesitant to provide loans for SMEs, but now more and more financial institutes were willing to provide loans.

He assured that the SME Bank would give preference to women in disbursing loans for business, particularly in the IT sector. The SME Bank, he said, had disbursed Rs21 million among 90 women entrepreneurs so far.

Marvi Ali of Tracker, Sohaib Umer of the TMT Venture Limited, Shahid Ansari, Samina Batool and others also spoke on the occasion. A large number of women