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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.