Mr. Bledar Kazia, Director General, National Cyber Security Authority of Albania,
Mr Carlos Manuel Baigorri, President of ANATEL in Brazil,
Ms Ingrid Macdonald, United Nations Resident Coordinator in Albania,
Ms Silvia Rucks, United Nations Resident Coordinator in Brazil,
distinguished partners and colleagues,
and most importantly, the girls and young women joining us from around the world,
It is a true pleasure to welcome you to the ITU global celebration of International Girls in ICT Day 2026.
I am delighted that this year’s theme is “AI for Development: Girls Shaping the Digital Future,”
The title of my speech this year is: Building With, Not Just For: The Genius of Girls in the Digital Age
Imagine two different futures.
In the first, an app detects malnutrition in a remote village, but it was designed by people who have never been hungry. An AI screens girls for depression, but its algorithm was trained only on teenage boys’ symptoms. It works—but it misses half the story.
In the second future, a 14-year-old girl in Jakarta codes a chatbot that helps her friends report bullying safely. A young woman in rural Kenya trains a crop-prediction model using her grandmother’s knowledge of rainfall patterns. She does not just use AI. She shapes it.
That is the difference between AI for development, and AI led by development’s true experts—its girls.
Today, AI is rewriting the rules of health, education, and climate resilience. Yet the people building it do not look like the people most in need.
Globally, men are nearly twice as likely as women to have digital skills. Only 22% of AI professionals are women. And in low-income countries, the gap is even steeper: a girl is 1.3 times more likely to be digitally excluded than a boy her age.
What happens when we leave girls out of the AI revolution? We get biased facial recognition, health algorithms that misdiagnose female patients, and job platforms that recommend women for lower-paid roles—automating inequality instead of solving it.
Girls Are Not Just Users. They Are Makers.
But here is what gives me hope. When a girl learns to code, she does not just get a job skill. She gains a lens. She sees problems adults overlook.
We have seen this happen:
• In India, a team of schoolgirls built an AI tool to detect early signs of depression in classmates—because they noticed teachers never did.
• In Brazil, girls in a favela trained a computer vision model to identify trash-blocked drainage channels, helping prevent floods.
• In Uganda, a 17-year-old created a voice-based AI assistant for farmers who cannot read—because she remembered her mother struggling with written guides.
This is not charity. This is R&D. Girls are the best low-cost, high-impact innovation labs we have—if we invest in them.
So how do we move from talking to doing?
First, access. Half the world’s girls still lack internet or a device. Let us make public Wi-Fi, digital labs, and coding clubs in every school a development priority—not a luxury.
Second, trust. Stop teaching girls to be careful consumers of tech. Teach them to be critical builders. Give them open-source tools, mentorship, and—crucially—the freedom to break things and rebuild them.
Third, scale their solutions. When a girl builds an AI model that works in her community, do not file it as a “nice story.” Fund it. Deploy it. Put her on the panel that decides national ed-tech policy.
A wise engineer once told me: “AI is like a mirror. It reflects back whoever built it.”
Right now, that mirror is showing us a world run by a small, privileged few. But if we give girls the keyboards, the data sets, and the seat at the table—that mirror will show something extraordinary.
It will show a girl in Lagos diagnosing crop disease.
It will show a girl in Manila translating emergency alerts for her deaf neighbour.
It will show a girl in rural Peru teaching AI to speak Quechua.
That is not just AI for development. That is AI as development. And it will be shaped by girls.
Thank you.
