This document outlines a 3-year initiative in India that uses ICT to strengthen women's political participation at the local government level. The project will work with 70 elected women representatives and 550 members of women's collectives across 3 sites. It has 3 main strategies: 1) Using an IVRS platform and meetings to strengthen linkages between elected women and grassroots groups; 2) Establishing women-run information centers to help communities access entitlements; 3) Employing community radio and video for citizenship education. Initial results show the information centers have addressed over 1,300 claims, 400 elected women have been connected through IVRS, and capacities of 111 elected women have been built through trainings. The long-term goal is to

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

9. Project Strategy 1
Strengthening linkages between elected
women leaders and marginalised women's
collectives

10. ● IVRS for networking
geographically
dispersed women's
collectives

11. ● Periodic Meetings
of elected women
leaders and
women's
collectives to
evolve a shared
local governance
agenda

12. ● Convening women-only
public forums at the
village level, to enable
women to effectively raise
demands with formal
power structures.

13. Project Strategy 2
Women-run ICT-enabled information centres to
help marginalised groups access entitlements

14. Role of information centres
● Info requests abt local
government functioning
● Entitlement claims related
to food security, social
security benefits,and rural
livelihoods

15. ● Information Outreach
visits to various
groups, in the
community.

16. Digitised entitlement
databases, and data
presentation
possibilities of GIS,
and 'information
fairs' for
awareness-raising,
to be explored.

17. Project Strategy 3
Community radio and community video for citizenship
education

18. Community media for
shaping an alternative
discourse on gender
and governance in
the local public
sphere

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

24. For more details...
● Visit www.itforchange.net
● Write to us!
itfc@itforchange.net