Testing the GenARDIS blog with a photo from one of the winning projects. This one is from Benin and the project is "Awareness-building, training and implementation project of an agricultural information system based on ICTs, at the benefit of ten women's groups in the Dassa-Zoumé district in Benin"

Rural Women in the Wired World
By Keane J. Shore

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.



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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
234924; email: GenARDIS@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@idrc.ca

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

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