Lessons from the Field: ICTs and Women's Empowerment


ICT has been promoted as an important tool in ensuring that marginalized groups, particularly women, are included in the development of the global information society. While ICT alone cannot end gender inequality, it can help catalyze social change and empowerment.

Throughout much of the developing world, gender discrimination makes it especially difficult for women to access and benefit from ICTs. Unless women are actively involved in the planning and use of new information technologies, there is a risk that ICTs will serve to reinforce, rather than overcome, gender inequalities. Recognizing the importance of women using ICTs, many projects are incorporating gender analysis to address women's access, participation, and determination of how such technologies are designed and deployed.

Computer Training
Numerous projects provide computer training to women. The Bayanloco Community Learning Center trains women in rural Nigeria to use information technology for peace and poverty alleviation. Through the center's services, women have access to computer training, health information, and a microcredit program. Indira Soochna Shakti is an ambitious project led mostly by the state government of Chhattisgarh to empower an entire generation of a quarter million school girls in all 1,605 government high schools by providing four years of high school IT education, for free. Another program, Tel-Nek, aims to equip rural and semi-rural women in the Bangalore district with vocational IT skills.

Training often leads to job opportunities for these women. The Datamation Foundation, a leading IT services firm in India, is partnering with several women's groups in an effort to create IT job opportunities for women from disadvantaged social and economic backgrounds. One of its first partners, Nari Raksha Samiti, has established a computer training center focusing on underprivileged, abused, and destitute women in the Delhi region. Through the center, an online complaint system for solving dowry and family dispute issues has also been established. Another training project, Digital Divide Data, hires and trains women to provide data entry services for US companies and organizations from its facility in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.


E-Commerce & Business Development
Several projects use IT to enable women to sell handicrafts over the Internet. ArtCamp is a successful women's artisan cooperative in Mexico that designs, produces, and sells handcrafted jewelry over the Internet to retailers in the US and Europe. India Shop is an e-commerce Web site designed specifically to sell products made by rural women's cooperatives and NGOs in Tamil Nadu, India. The site helps them obtain higher prices and thus larger profit margins by selling their products online, thereby replacing the middleman. Through the Tortas Peru Web site, women in Lima are able to take orders for their baked goods from all over the world, providing a source of income for housewives who find it difficult to find work outside of their homes, while also promoting computer literacy among women who might have little opportunity to access new technology otherwise.

Other projects offer support to women entrepreneurs. Mujeres, Oportunidades, Y Negocios (Women, Opportunities, and Business) is an information portal where women can receive help and advice in starting or developing their own enterprises using information technology tools. The TechPreneurs Program at the Owerri Digital Village teaches women participants the technology skills to manage their businesses effectively. Another, Women's Information Resource and Electronic Services (WIRES), enables women entrepreneurs and women's organizations that promote enterprise development to explore ways and means of exploiting ICTs for community economic empowerment.


Empowerment
Many initiatives, such as the Women on the Net (WoN) project, work to assist women using the Internet for their own empowerment. Women'sNet is an innovative networking support program designed to enable South African women to use the Internet to find the issues, resources, contacts, and tools needed for women's social activism. Further, the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), which serves over 250,000 women in India, is deploying a dozen Technology Information Centers to provide training to their "barefoot managers," to build the capacity of their women organizers and leaders, and to strengthen the microenterprises of their members.

Combined with other multi-media technologies, IT is being used to give women a voice. CEMINA is a Brazilian NGO that uses radio as its medium of information dissemination reaching impoverished women across the country. Broadcast daily, Radio Fala Muhler (Women Speak Up) provides a medium for women to share their knowledge, experiences, and professional expertise to create a support network for Brazilian women. The show is also available online in order to reach women who live outside the station's broadcast range, as well as to encourage women to become IT-literate. The Centro de Mujeres Comunicadoras Mayas (the Center for Mayan Women Communicators) in Guatemala provides training to indigenous women in video production, photography, computer use, and Internet communication helping them to develop the skills they need to better represent themselves in the media and in the world.


Microfinance
Some projects are using technology to enhance microfinance programs. Both the Dhan Foundation and Swayam Krishi Sangam are using handhelds and smart cards to improve microfinance projects that are primarily aimed at empowering women from the poorest backgrounds. Another, Mahila Sphurthi, is empowering poor and rural women by using an integrated information system to streamline the activities of self help groups, or groups of local women involved in microfinance and group savings.

Another project, Grameen Telecom's Village Phone Program, is using microfinance to enhance the spread of technology. Through the program, members of Grameen Bank's revolving credit system use bank credit to buy a cellular phone which they then used to sell phone services in underserved rural areas of Bangladesh. More than 75% of phone operators are female; in a society with strict rules governing the interaction between men and women, having female phone operators has increased phone access to higher percentages of local women than in areas where the phone operators are male. There is also some evidence that, because the phones are so important for whole villages, having female operators has helped to enhance the status of women in the communities where they work.


More Resources
Search the Clearinghouse for more than 50 ICT-related activities that have Empowerment of Women as an activity type. Search

Media and Gender Monitor is a bi-annual publication by the Women's Program at the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC). The publication aims to strike a balance between research and news, providing in-depth coverage on the WACC regional conferences on gender and communication policy, a forum involving media specialists, as well as news on media and gender issues from around the world.

Gender, Information Technology, and Developing Countries is an analytical study the provides a conceptual framework to inform the creation of appropriate information and communication technology (IT) programs and activities for women and girls in developing countries.

Gender Evaluation Methodology (GEM) Software is a guide to integrating a gender analysis into evaluations of initiatives that use information and communication technologies for social change. GEM provides a means for determining whether ICTs are really improving women's lives and gender relations as well as promoting positive change at the individual, institutional, community and broader social levels.