Anita Gurumurthy is a founding member and executive director of IT for Change (www.ITforChange.net), an India-based NGO engaged in policy research and advocacy on ICTD. Anita's academic work has been in the areas of gender, public health, globalisation and the information society. She has written extensively on gender and ICTD from a Southern perspective, interrogating the construction of the mainstream discourse on social justice and equity. Anita’s earlier work has included research and writing on the qualitative indicators of women’s empowerment and policy research on reproductive health and rights of women. Her research on private-public partnerships in the health sector in India has been a significant addition to the body of critical work on the emerging public policy area.
At IT for Change Anita's research work has focussed on the theoretical and discursive aspects of the information society. Anita leads the pan-Asia research network Gender and Citizenship in the Information Society (gender-IS-citizenship.net). The network has emerged as a vibrant site of scholarship contributing pioneering work from a southern feminist standpoint.
Anita serves on the Board of ISIS International Manila - an Asia-Pacific feminist organisation; she is also a member of various expert committees including the advisory committee of the IDS Knowledge Services and the BRIDGE gender group at IDS Sussex and the International Advisory Committee of the Public Access to ICT Impact project of the Gates Foundation and IDRC. Anita represented Development Alternatives with Women in a New Era (DAWN), a southern feminist network at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), and was also the Asia coordinator of the WSIS Gender Caucus. She has served as a member of the UN-GAID Expert Committee on Connectivity and Access in Least Developed Countries in 2008.