CEDAW/C/GC/34 technology, and technology to reduce the burden of unpaid domestic and productive work are available and accessible to rural women and create enabling environments that improve their access to technology, including ICT, in rural areas. Rural women should be consulted in the development of such technology and their access to such innovative technological solutions should be promoted. 7. Information and communications technology 75. ICT (including radio, television, mobile phones, computers and the Internet) plays an important role in empowering rural women and girls by connecting them to the broader world and providing easy access to information and education. Various forms of technology can meet a diversity of needs, from joining online communities to taking advantage of distance learning. However, rural women and girls are disproportionately affected by gender gaps in access to ICT, which is an important dimension of the digital divide. For rural women and girls, poverty, geographic isolation, language barriers, a lack of computer literacy and discriminatory gender stereotypes can all hamper access to ICT. 76. States parties should adopt measures to promote gender equality in the ICT sector and improve the access of rural women and girls to ICT, as well as develop or expand initiatives to increase their ICT skills, for example, through the development of village-based or community-based knowledge centres. States parties should also explore public awareness-raising and training through mobile phone technology, which has the potential to reach rural women and girls. 8. Land and agrarian reform, land acquisition and resettlement 77. Land and agrarian reform often exclude rural women and are not implemented in a gender-responsive manner. Land reform policies sometimes have a male bias, such as registering land only in men’s names, making compensation payments mostly in their name or compensating for land use restrictions (resulting in the loss of land, the loss of use and the loss of land value) based only on men ’s activities. 78. States parties should give priority to rural women’s equal rights to land when undertaking land and agrarian reforms and consider it a specific and central objective of land reform. They should: (a) Ensure that land and agrarian reform programmes integrate gender-specific goals, targets and measures, and advance both formal and substantive equality, for example through joint titling, and require the wife’s consent for the sale or mortgage of jointly owned land or for engaging in financial transactions linked to the land; (b) Recognize and include rural women’s equal rights to land in any land distribution, registration and titling or certification schemes; (c) Formally recognize and review indigenous women’s laws, traditions, customs and land tenure systems, with the aim of eliminating discriminatory provisions; (d) Develop and implement measures, including temporary special measures, to enable rural women to benefit from the public distribution, lease 16-03601 21/25