Enhancing Worker Digital Experience: A Hands-on Workshop for Partners
Presentation for un women board meeting 18 sept2013_finalversion
1. Making Women's Voices and Votes Count
An ICT-based strategy
2013-14
An India-based initiative supported by
2. Introduction
● Translating women's political presence
into effective participation.
● Project partners
IT for Change – Mysore (Karnataka)
ANANDI – Bhavnagar (Gujarat)
KMVS – Kutch (Gujarat)
● Focuses on 70 Elected Women
Representatives and 550 members of
women's collectives across 3 sites
3. Genesis of the Project
Rooted in the insights emerging from IT for
Change's decade long quest for a Southern
feminist idiom of technology.
4. Insight 1: Mobiles are no magic bullet for women's
empowerment!
● Low bandwidth, mobile Internet that most of the developing
world relies upon,is more restrictive and less generative than
Broadband (Gurumurthy 2010)
● This effectively constrains the empowering possibilities for
marginalised groups and remote areas.
5. Insight 2: A culture of political and collective use of
ICTs is the result of strategic intervention design
● CITIGEN-Asia research
programme experiences in:
Philippines
Hong Kong
Sri Lanka
6. Insight 3: The importance of public access and the
woman infomediary
● Assisted public access
crucial for marginalised
women to be active
citizens (TASCHA 2013)
7. Insight 4: Feminist praxis in the information age
● Gender justice and struggles for
socio-economic justice are intersecting
in complex ways (Sen 2005)
● Feminist appropriation of technology
should focus on both positive and
negative rights of women, in the
emergent information society
8. The Project Design
-
- Normative project of women's citizenship
includes the agenda of socio-economic justice.
- Facilitated, 'meaningful' access to the Internet
and ICTs for marginalised women
- A multi-pronged ICT strategy for building a
political culture among women at the grassroots
14. Role of information centres
● Info requests abt local
government functioning
● Entitlement claims related
to food security, social
security benefits,and rural
livelihoods
19. Results achieved
Information Centres Number of Claims addressed over the past
6 months
4 centres of IT for Change 290
2 centres of KMVS 355
2 centres of ANANDI 693
20. Results achieved
● 44 women-only public forums have been organised in the
project area.
● 400 elected women have been connected through an
IVRS platform at the KMVS site. (Soon to be extended to
other sites)
● The capacities of 111 elected women in viewing
governance issues through a gender lens, and in using
technology, have been built through a series of trainings.
21. Results achieved
● In IT for Change, the weekly radio broadcast 'Kelu Sakhi'
(Listen,my friend) reaches 50 women's collectives and 50
elected women.
● In KMVS, 6000 women from collectives (including 50
elected women) listen to weekly broadcast of radio series
-'Khaso Shashan' (good governance).
22. ● The effect of reservations in terms of visible gains for elected
women leaders and women in the community, can be witnessed
only after two terms of reservation.
(Source: Powerful Women – Does Exposure reduce bias?)
Recognising the important, intangible results...
23. ● Acknowledging the promise that ICTs offer, for
challenging traditional barriers to women's
public-political participation
