UN Women AI School — Regional AI Upskilling for Gender-Equality Advocates Across Asia-Pacific

UN Women's Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, based in Bangkok, launched the free AI School in May 2024 to give gender-equality advocates, feminist leaders, climate-justice activists, entrepreneurs and professionals from underrepresented communities across Asia and the Pacific practical AI skills.

The programme aims to build regional capacity for gender-inclusive AI use and governance, covering AI foundations, responsible AI, bias mitigation and prompt engineering, delivered through both virtual and in-person formats to reach participants across the region rather than a single location.

The school runs three tracks — a two-day Design track and a Policy track (each five one-hour sessions) and a three-month Access track combining weekly classes, expert talks and labs — supported by a custom Companion GPT for tutoring and a Grand Challenge on gender-inclusive AI design. Graduates have gone on to build applied tools, including the CSW GPT digital assistant developed with the 30 for 2030 Youth Leadership Network to support the Beijing+30 review process.

As of 2025 the programme reports over 3,000 participants since its May 2024 launch and 100% overall satisfaction in participant surveys, though these are self-reported programme statistics without an independent evaluation or published disaggregated completion or skills-assessment data.

Because the school is regional and mostly virtual rather than tied to a single classroom or institution, direct comparison with single-institution pilots is not appropriate, and stronger outcome evidence — such as independent assessment or completion tracking — would be needed to move beyond self-reported satisfaction data.