The Ministry of Women of Paraguay and CAF – Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean co-organized a side event on March 11 at the United Nations headquarters in New York, focusing on how technology and artificial intelligence affect digital violence against women. The event, titled “Innovation Lab: Technology and Digital Justice with a Women’s Face,” was held as part of the 70th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70).
The discussion addressed both the risks and opportunities that new technologies present for women’s safety. Organizers highlighted that while digital tools can help prevent violence and improve access to justice, they can also be used to perpetrate harm through practices such as doxing, non-consensual surveillance, extortion with intimate material, and misinformation.
Ana Baiardi, CAF’s Manager of Gender, Inclusion and Diversity, said: “Technology is not neutral. The same algorithms that can help detect patterns of risk and shorten the time between reporting and assistance can also amplify biases, violate privacy and become instruments of control and violence. That is why the debate on artificial intelligence, technology and gender cannot remain on the surface of the cases: it has to go to the architectures, the algorithms, the data with which they are trained and who decides what is optimized and for whom. From CAF we understand that development banking has a role to play in this: supporting the States in the design of regulatory frameworks with a gender perspective, financing solutions that prioritize due diligence and privacy, and making visible the innovators that are already building these answers from the region.” Alicia Pomata, Minister of Women of Paraguay, said: “The same innovation that challenges us today is the one that offers us unprecedented capabilities for prevention, real-time monitoring and the creation of immediate response networks. Our task at this CSW70 is not to fear technical advancement, but to ensure that the design of every code and every platform is ethically responsible and secure by design, transforming the systems that isolate us today into infrastructures of protection, equality and justice. The challenge, then, is clear: we must work together so that technological solutions are designed with a gender perspective, but also with institutions capable of using them to protect rights, reduce gaps and guarantee equality before the law. From the Government of Paraguay, we firmly believe that innovation, international cooperation and the exchange of experiences are key to advance towards more accessible, more effective justice systems that are more sensitive to the realities experienced by women.”
Panelists included Daniela Camberos—founder of Ramona AI—who presented an artificial intelligence tool aimed at protecting vulnerable people from labor fraud via real-time alerts; Mariana Sánchez Caparrós from IALAB-UBA discussed using AI in legal processes related to gender violence; Julieta Rueff shared her experience developing FlamAid—a panic button device; while Minister Pomata described Paraguay’s system for monitoring cases.
The panel identified three main areas for action: creating public policy criteria for data governance with a gender focus; developing tools for faster reporting-to-assistance times; ensuring equality before law by preventing algorithmic discrimination.
Ana Baiardi closed by highlighting initiatives like CAF-WIT 2026 Award as ways to support regional innovation led by women. The Innovation Lab forms part of broader activities by CAF during CSW70 aimed at promoting knowledge transfer in Latin America.
