This toolkit has been designed as a starting point for practitioners working on integrating gender considerations in anti-cybercrime capacity-building activities, and incorporates example projects illustrating the steps involved in planning, implementation and evaluation phases.
What is the toolkit and who is it for?
This toolkit aims to provide both domestic and international capacity-builders engaged in combating cybercrime with actionable recommendations for ensuring the meaningful and practical inclusion of gender equity and sensitivity into their activities. Building on example projects as well as existing international resources and literature, this toolkit will introduce capacity-builders to core concepts that are foundational to designing activities in a gender-sensitive way.
This toolkit will introduce capacity-builders to core concepts that are foundational to designing activities in a gender-sensitive way
This toolkit is intended as a starting point for guidance on integrating gender considerations into capacity-building activities; as such, it is not all-encompassing. There is no universal approach to gender equity and sensitivity, and this toolkit does not presume to cover gender in a way that captures all cultural and regional variances. Additionally, the practice of incorporating gender in cybercrime capacity building is dynamic: as more and more empirical data on gendered harms and discrimination is gathered, and as technology develops, our understanding of how these harms are mitigated in capacity-building activities needs to evolve. The meaningful incorporation of gender equity and sensitivity into capacity-building efforts is a continuous endeavour, and must account for local contexts.
The Strategic Approach to Countering Cybercrime (SACC) framework
The practical sections of the toolkit are built around four of the five pillars of cybercrime capacity-building, as developed under Chatham House’s Strategic Approach to Countering Cybercrime (SACC) framework.
The SACC framework has been developed by researchers in Chatham House’s International Security Programme to help countries understand how cybercrime is perceived, and what the main enablers of and barriers to a strategic approach to fighting cybercrime – specific to a particular country – might be. The framework is intended to support any country in developing an effective and strategic approach to cybercrime through helping it to: develop a set of anti-cybercrime interventions that address the country’s specific needs and priorities; identify gaps in its current plans; and benefit from the established good practice and practical support available from the international cybercrime-fighting community.
The SACC framework has five pillars that focus on the whole life cycle of a cybercrime national response. Four of the pillars are considered in this toolkit. They are:
- Strategy development
- Establishing the enablers
- Establishing operational capability
- Tasking and prioritization
These four pillars have been identified for their relevance and applicability to capacity-building efforts. The SACC framework also includes a fifth pillar on evaluation, exploring how the effectiveness of a country’s activities at the operational, tactical and strategic levels is evaluated, and how this information is used to improve that country’s strategic response to its cybercrime risks. This does not feature as an independent pillar in the toolkit, which instead incorporates evaluation within each of the four pillars considered, with concrete recommendations for gender integration.
