To our guests, speakers, participants, my fellow government servants, stakeholders and members of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a pleasant day to you all.

On behalf of the Department of Information and Communications Technology, allow me to extend my gratitude to everyone for being here with us today. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Training: Gender Based AI Policy in the Philippines.

The Philippines gears up to be a Digital Nation. Our aim is to be a prosperous middle-class society by 2040 and we aspire to be a globally competitive knowledge economy. To build the foundation for a knowledge economy, the national priorities include the promotion and acceleration of technology adoption and stimulation of innovation in all economic sectors.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. acknowledges that emerging technologies could solve many of our lingering problems, but also emphasizes the dangers it could cause, thus, the need for our governance structures to keep up. 

Artificial Intelligence is a promising technology, but we must ensure its proper development and use, and that it will help advance our efforts on inclusive development and gender equality. Already, the digital divide is becoming the new face of gender inequality. We must harness new technologies such as AI to reverse this. 

Thus, we thank the ITU for choosing the Philippines as among the primary beneficiaries of the project called “Enhancing the Development of Standards and Frameworks for Critical Technologies in Southeast Asia,” a project funded by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) that focuses on critical technologies, such as AI and the potential gender and social biases linked to them.

In particular, this two-day training aims to develop awareness among policymakers of the importance of inclusion of gender-sensitive AI in the regulatory processes; build capacity among female policymakers to lead AI regulation in the country and enhancing standards for the same; and foster knowledge and experience exchanges on AI policy between policymakers in Southeast Asia.

This training will cover AI policies at global, regional and local levels; AI context, risks, and measures to minimize them; and AI standards development. It will delve on the gender and societal risks in AI, ethics of policy making in AI, how standards support critical and emerging technology, international standardization on AI, and gender-responsive standard.  

The outputs of the ITU’s project research as presented yesterday, established AI from the perspective of gender and social biases, making it imperative to develop awareness among policy makers of the importance of inclusion of gender-sensitive AI in their regulatory processes.

Artificial Intelligence will change the way we do things. It will revolutionize how we manage businesses. It will enable doctors and hospitals to better analyze patients’ health data. It can help improve student’s learning experience based on their needs. Governments can design better policies and make better decisions through AI. 

We must harness AI’s potential to uplift our citizens, our local industries, and our economy. We must put in place the necessary policies and ensure that these are inclusive and gender-sensitive. That is precisely our goal in having this training, and we thank again the ITU for this opportunity.

To our training participants, I wish you all a fruitful experience. Thank you.