News: Gender & ICTs

The Association for Progressive Communications Women’s Programme is proud to announce that Take Back the Tech was awarded an honorary mention by the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica International Competition for Cyber Arts for its innovative, collaborative campaign to end violence against women.

The Open Institute – a Cambodian NGO – launched a Khmer language web portal on October 24 2007. It will give non-profits, the government, and other organisations working on women’s issues in Cambodia easy access to legislation and latest developments related to women’s issues.

The 2007 Global Information Society Watch report identifies Nigeria as the fastest growing ICT market in Africa. Despite this, women remain severely under-represented among the country’s ICT professionals. And yet, one young woman in APC-member Fantsuam’s ICT department became a role model when she became the first woman to climb a communications tower in northern Nigeria.

Violence against women was the theme of a recent digital storytelling workshop organised by APC’s programme in Africa and APC’s South African member Women’sNet, held in Durban, South Africa from 25 to 29 August 2007. Seventeen women from throughout Africa gathered for one week to develop the skills to use technology for the creation of digital stories as a means of combating domestic, sexual and other forms of violence faced by African women.

GEM speaks to people, said Sarah Earl, an evaluation specialist attending a workshop to improve what’s been coined as the Gender Evaluation Methodology. More than an evaluation theory, GEM "is a development theory," commented Earl who, along with over 40 ICT practitioners from around the world, took part in a training exchange in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the end of July 2007. Read the full account on APC WNSP.

Through evaluations we can measure to what extent our work is contributing our bit, our grain of sand, in the struggle for a better world. The APC women’s programme took this premise to heart when it developed the Gender Evaluation Methodology (GEM). At the end of July women and men from around the world gathered in Kuala Lumpur to share their experiences with the use of GEM in particular and evaluations in general. One of the lessons learned was…

LAC-DROLET, Canada, -- “This prize will be of great help to us in building our capacity to promote the rights of women farmers through the demystification of new ICTs, and through gender advocacy,"

APCNews and GenderIT.org are building a pool of writers to contribute on a freelance basis. We are interested in working with writers from all continents. APC is a virtual network and in general most of our research and interviews are done online. Read the details and send your application before May 15, 2007.

The Gender Research in Africa into ICTs for Empowerment (GRACE) is a research project that APCNews has been covering in the past. APC’s women programme in Africa (AAW) also engaged with the project over the last months. But where is it at? Capacity building workshops were held in July 2005 and June 2006, with a third workshop planned for July 2007. Here is a short update on GRACE.

In releasing the list of successful applicants in one of its small grants initiatives, APC’s women programme in Africa injected some real-life into the Swahili word "harambee" in March 2007. Blogs for African Women (BAWo) has taken hold of the Nigerian blogging spirit to strengthen women’s activism and by the same token, got awarded one of six Harambee small grants. Read about Networking for Success, BAWo’s second initiative getting Nigerian women into the blogosphere.