[GRACE] [DigAfrica] Rural Women in the Wired World

[Dorothy Okello]

Rural Women in the Wired World
Keane J. Shore

IDRC Photo: P. Bennett

In this age of instantaneous electronic 
communication, the term "digital divide" has 
become standard shorthand to describe the gap 
between those who have access to advanced 
communication technologies and those who don't.

Often, the term is applied, in a general way, to 
describe how the rich have greater access to 
information and communication technologies (ICTs) 
than the poor. Other times, it refers to the 
disparity between people in rural and urban 
settings. International Women's Day (IWD) 
provides an opportunity to consider another form 
of digital divide — the one that separates men 
from women — and to look at some recent attempts to build bridges across it.

Women who live in rural areas are at a particular 
disadvantage in the digital world — facing 
multiple barriers related both to gender and 
location. Given their central role in the 
agricultural economy, for example, rural women 
often have too much work and too little time to 
become familiar with these new technologies. And 
with their special responsibilities for children 
and the elderly, women typically cannot migrate 
as easily as men to towns and cities where 
training in the new technologies is more available.

Cultural attitudes preventing women from visiting 
public access points frequented by men — in 
addition to generally lower levels of education 
and less political and economic power than their 
male counterparts — also limit women's ability to 
enter the new world of ICTs. Add to this the lack 
of ICT materials in local languages, and the obstacles seem formidable indeed.

But there is hope. In 2005, for instance, judges 
for the small grants fund GenARDIS (short for 
Gender and Agricultural/Rural Development in the 
Information Society) combed through some 300 
applications to a competition to fund projects 
aimed at breaking down those barriers separating 
rural women from the benefits of ICTs. GenARDIS — 
a collaborative venture of Canada's International 
Development Research Centre (IDRC), the European 
Union's Technical Centre for Agricultural and 
Rural Cooperation (CTA), the International 
Institute for Communication and Development 
(IICD), and the Netherlands-based Humanist 
Institute for Cooperation with Developing 
Countries (Hivos) — finally selected 10 winning 
entries from countries in Africa, the Caribbean, 
and the Pacific. Each of the winners was awarded 5 000 Euros.

Cumulatively, the winning entries form a 
fascinating snapshot of how a variety of tools 
and tactics — for instance, providing access to 
cellular phones, getting women connected to the 
Internet, and creating educational video — serve 
both rural women's day-to-day needs and the 
longer-term goal of advancing the position of 
women within society. Here are some examples.


Raising women's status in the Democratic Republic of Congo
In fact, a project in the Democratic Republic of 
Congo (DRC) shows how the daily, practical issues 
women face and the wider goal of social 
emancipation are interwoven and inter-related.

Arche d'Alliance is a nongovernmental 
organization (NGO) spearheading a pilot project 
involving 70 women in the DRC's Uvira region. At 
a surface level, the major aim of the project is 
to teach the women how to use the Internet to 
find and apply better farming methods and better ways to market their produce.

"This prize will have a real impact on our 
ability to help rural women make strides in the 
agriculture, (animal) breeding, fishing, and 
craft sectors," says spokesperson Brigitte 
Kasongo Mawazo. But she quickly adds that 
realizing those practical goals is expected to 
lead to an improvement in the status of women 
within their communities, partly because of the 
project's subsidiary impact of "teaching them 
their rights while eliminating illiteracy. 
Reinforcing our capacity this way enables us to 
become increasingly useful to other women, and our whole community."

Indeed, women and children in Congo have suffered 
greatly as a prolonged period of war, which 
engulfed the country between 1996 and 2003, led 
to social breakdown and large-scale human rights 
abuses. Arche d'Alliance is hopeful that their 
new fluency with the Internet will raise the 
community standing of the women in the pilot 
project. For one, it gives them new skills that 
they will be able to teach to men — reversing the 
existing power dynamic. It also helps these women 
develop an enhanced economic acumen that 
hopefully can be parlayed into a voice in 
community decisions on economic development.

The pilot project in Uvira region is just one 
part of Arche d'Alliance's wider, nation-wide 
drive to use ICTs to improve the status of women 
and to promote human rights and enlightened 
social and economic development policies. "The 
right to information," states Kasongo Mawazo, 
summarizing the NGO's approach, "gives rural 
women real power to advocate and to act for change."


Videos for human rights in Tonga
Human rights issues are also being addressed 
directly in Tonga, where Coconut Productions is 
using its GenARDIS prize to create an ambitious 
video series. The videos aim to raise rural 
Tongan women's awareness of gender issues and to 
advocate for Tonga's adoption of the United 
Nations' 1979 Convention on the Elimination of 
All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

Tonga is the only Polynesian country that has not 
ratified CEDAW, and there are troubling signs 
that the position of women is worsening there. 
Tongan women who are desperate to escape their 
rural homes for perceived opportunities in 
Nuku'alofa, the capital, or overseas are 
increasingly falling into prostitution or 
becoming victims of trafficking. Meanwhile, many 
long-time small businesses owned and operated by 
women in rural areas are finding themselves 
unable to provide the new goods and match the 
lower prices of an influx of foreign competitors 
and are being forced to close their doors.

The economic desperation that fuels the 
exploitation of women is sustained, in part, by 
the lack of education of women living on Tonga's 
outer islands, and also by their lack of access 
to information from the wider world. One of the 
issues that Coconut Productions is dealing with 
in its videos, therefore, is how access to 
information through modern ICTs could help women 
mobilize on important public issues such as 
health, education, economic development, and governance.


A global neighbourhood in Burkina Faso
One trait that's common to a number of 
GenARDIS-award winning projects is an aim to have 
an impact well beyond the women who are participating directly in the projects.

In Burkina Faso, for example, a project that 
makes it possible for 30 rural women to use the 
Internet is designed to stimulate much broader 
communication within rural communities in that 
country. Association Manegdbzanga, which houses 
the project, envisions the new Internet access, 
first, as a way of allowing participants to 
communicate with other rural women around the 
world, so as to gather insight into how women 
elsewhere deal with challenges similar to their 
own. But during their daily work as farmers and 
gardeners, the participants are also in direct 
contact with neighbours —allowing them to 
communicate what they have learned through their 
electronic connections. In addition, Association 
Manegdbzanga publishes a nation-wide newspaper 
that can transmit more broadly the project 
participants' new, Internet-derived knowledge.

Part of the benefit of this project, of course, 
is a personal one for the women involved. The 
association is providing women the funding and 
time to participate in a study course that allows 
them to learn, at their own pace, how to use 
ICTs. Despite the obstacles they face — such as 
low levels of education and literacy, and the 
steep demands of daily farm work — there is 
optimism that these women will succeed. "We think 
these constraints will be overcome by the 
dynamism of the women and their will to discover 
ICTs," says project coordinator Eric Ilboudo.

Ultimately, the association sees this project 
more as a beginning than as an end in itself. 
Project operators hope the pilot will influence 
Burkina Faso's government to introduce a small 
grants program to expand training for rural women 
in ICT use. They are also advocating government 
financing for software development in the Sudanic 
dialect, spoken by about 90 percent of the population.


An electronic well head in Lesotho
In a similar vein, a project in Lesotho to 
investigate the benefits of cell phone use by 
women in 25 rural families is unfolding as part 
of a larger design to stimulate a resurgence in the local agricultural economy.

The women in Lesotho's Eyking area — who are 
isolated and lack access to traditional village 
communications methods — are cut off from crucial 
information that could help them farm more 
productively. That's why Econet-Ezitel is 
providing them with cell phones. Now the women in 
the pilot project can check markets for the best 
prices for their products and keep in touch with local farming co-ops.

"Women in the villages have traditionally 
networked
by meeting at the village well when 
they get water," explains David Dolly, of 
Lesotho's Thulare-Eyking Agricultural Development 
Project. "Giving them cell phones and air time 
means we now have an electronic well head."

If it turns out that the phone contact can help 
women improve their families' productivity and 
earnings and raise their own status, the example 
would become an important one in Lesotho, which 
is mired in economic difficulties. Lesotho's per 
capita income ranks about 150th in the world, 
with some seven out of 10 Basotho (as the people 
of Lesotho are called) eking out a livelihood on declining subsistence farms.

The hope is that — if this pilot project is 
successful — other agricultural co-ops will 
emulate it, giving Lesotho's farm productivity 
the boost it badly needs. While this impact is 
important in itself, project organizers hope for 
even more exciting ripple effects. If other rural 
groups — in the health and local government 
sectors, for example — follow the "well head" 
project's example and build their organizations 
around their own networks of connected women, the 
concept could revitalize Lesotho as a whole.


Farming services by cell phone
Cell phones are also seen as a crucial tool for 
the advancement of rural women in Trinidad and 
Tobago, where a GenARDIS award-winning project is 
tracking how seven male farmers and seven female 
farmers use the technology. Women farmers 
comprise about 12 percent of the islands' 
agricultural workforce, and there are indications 
that jobs available to women in the sector are 
less permanent than their male counterparts'. The 
case study aims to demonstrate how access to cell 
phones can increase the stability of women's 
agricultural employment by strengthening their networks.

The cell phone study, again, is part of a grander 
plan that includes setting up and operating a 
database of Trinidad's female small-scale 
farmers, a workable small credit operation for 
them, a clearinghouse for certain products women 
produce, and a women's market information source.

With all the GenARDIS-supported projects, ICTs 
are only a means — albeit a very powerful means — 
to an end, rather than an end in themselves. 
Access to information is the tool that allows 
women to envision small advances in everyday life 
and more monumental strides over time.


----------------------------------------------------------------------
More information:

Keane J. Shore is an Ottawa-based writer and editor.

GenARDIS Small Grants Fund c/o Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET)
Attn.: Dr Dorothy Okello, PO Box 4411, Kampala, Uganda. Fax: + 256 (0)
41 530474; email: GenARDIS at cta.int


Ramata Molo Thioune, Program Officer, Acacia 
program initiative, IDRC, Regional Office for 
West and Central Africa, Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop, 
X Bd de l'Est, Point E Dakar, PO 11007, Peytavin, 
Dakar, Senegal, Tel.: (+221) 864-0000; email: rthioune at idrc.ca

Women of Uganda (WOUGNET): http://www.wougnet.org/

http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2006/april/womenit.htm


ADDENDUM: From 3-7 July 2006, there will be a 
GenARDIS workshop which will include 
presentations and discussion of projects by the 
2005 GenARDIS grant winners and honourable 
mentions as well as training on gender evaluation 
methodology.  The workshop will be held at 
Imperial Resort Beach Hotel, Entebbe, and is 
locally organised by WOUGNET on behalf of the 
Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 
and the GenARDIS partners: CTA, IDRC, Hivos and 
IICD. The GenARDIS workshop will have some joint 
sessions with a parallel conference organised by 
CTA and the Regional Universities FORUM For 
Capacity Building in Agriculture (locally 
organised by RUFORUM and the Department of 
Agriculture, Makerere University). The theme for 
the parallel conference is 'Women in Science for 
Food and Nutrition Security in Africa'.



--------------------------------------------------------------------~->

Dig Africa site welcomes you to join us at 
http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/Digafrica


You can also join a Kenyan community based group 
that is open to all. This forum has ngos and 
members that are networking on how to help 
communities in Kenya and the url is 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Kenyainternationalgroup

You can also subscribe directly by emailing chifu at chifu2222 at msn.com

Thank you for your membership.

Chifu



--
Dorothy Okello
Coordinator, WOUGNET
Plot 53 Kira Road
Tel: +256-41-532035
Fax: +256-41-530474
Web: http://www.wougnet.org