• Communicating strategically requires a clearly defined strategy with specific gender and transport goals established in advance.
• A strong transport communication program should engage multiple stakeholders at the national, district and community level.
• A successful gender and transport communication plan always considers ways to build capacity at the institutional and community level.

Gender and Transport communication has to aim at effecting broader social change as a necessary means to achieve sustainable behavior change that increases the access of women and girls.

• The socio-cultural context defines the targets of opportunity (or barriers) for change.
• Dialogue serves as a basis for collective action.
• Information is shared or exchanged between two or more individuals rather than transmitted from one to the other. No one is a passive receiver of information.
• Importance is given to the participant's perception and interpretation of information and understanding that communication is a process of dialogue or ongoing cultural conversation.
• Communication within a community or group is required to identify areas of agreement and disagreement.

What do we mean by information communication technologies "ICTs"?

• Services include classic telecom services such as telephone, fax, and mobile telephone. Services used together with computer hardware and software form the basis for a range of other services, including email, direct file transfer, and internet.
• Technologies include a broad array ranging from 'old' technologies such as TV and radio (broadcast and ham) to 'new' ones such as cellular mobile; while networks may be comprised of copper or fiber optic cable, wireless or cellular mobile links, and satellite links.
• Applications include videoconferencing, teleworking, distance learning, management information systems, stock taking. Thus services as basic as telephones are at issue, as well as applications as complex as "telemetering", for example, to remotely monitor water conditions as part of a flood forecasting system. Indeed, many services and applications can be made available as soon as telephone service is provided: the same type of technologies that are used to transmit voice can also transmit fax, data, and digitally compressed video.

"The importance of ICTs is not the technology as such, but its enabling function in access to knowledge, information and communications: increasingly important elements in today's economic and social interaction."

• When trying to influence specific audiences, it may be useful to use intermediary institutions to lobby your actual target audience.
• The media can be a useful tool in building 'background noise' in support of your cause, so that when you do reach your target audience with specific messages, they are already familiar with the subject and themes within it.
• It will be necessary to raise the profile and capacity and reputation of the instruments of influence (i.e., the institutions that will be carrying the messages).
• When trying to change the way individuals work, show them how much they have already achieved in meeting the needs of both men and women in their work - then point out how much more effective they could be by incorporating your advice.
• The most influential tool you have for changing the way people work and think is gender disaggregated EVIDENCE.
• Look for a niche for your information: i.e., find out what other people are doing and what information would be useful to them and try to 'fit' your advice so that it meets their needs.