News: Gender & ICTs, Africa

From now until June 2008, four organisations – including APC – are inviting applications for the third round of the GenARDIS small grants programme. A total of fifteen grants of 7 000 Euros will be given out to successful projects.

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.

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.