Digital opportunities for change

Since 2001, the Women of Uganda Network has been developed a wide range of initiatives to improve access to ICTs for women farmers and entrepreneurs.

Research has shown that women in Uganda are three times more likely than men to be aware of and to use information and communication technologies (ICTs). Women are also the main customers of Uganda’s many privately owned computer training centres, often as a means to improve their secretarial training – a stereotypical role for a woman – by learning elementary computer skills.

But few women own or manage any of these private ICT business centres. Although support from the country’s Rural Communications Development Fund has contributed to the spread of ICT facilities and services to less privileged areas, far fewer women have benefited from these projects than their male counterparts. If women continue to be excluded from the benefits of ICTs, including being able to use them to improve their social and economic status, then they are likely to become further marginalized as members of their communities.

In May 2000, several women’s organizations in Uganda came together to set up the Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET), a non-governmental organization to promote the use of ICTs among women. WOUGNET’s vision is of a society in which women use technology to share information and to tackle local and national issues collectively in an effort to promote sustainable development. At present, the organization has more than 90 women’s organizations as members, the majority of which are in urban areas and districts where there is some internet access.

One of WOUGNET’s first activities was to develop a web design programme for members so that they could create their own websites and promote their work on the internet. The websites would be a useful tool for making contacts, forging partnerships, fundraising, and marketing services and crafts. Initially, WOUGNET’s own website provided the core of internet activity for members, and it still contains the profiles of many local women’s organizations plus information on various related topics and projects in Uganda and around the world.

Debate

Over the years, the website has continued to develop and, using web 2.0 tools, has become an interactive site for members to share information on many subjects, including ICTs for development, gender and human rights. The site also contains details of initiatives launched by the government and other agencies, as well as relevant news stories. WOUGNET now hosts a number of other websites, including the Kubere Information Centre website and the Women in Business Portal, which are becoming increasingly important sources of information on agricultural production and entrepreneurship respectively.

The organization’s electronic mailing lists provide a useful forum for discussing issues related to the use of ICTs for development, gender and human rights. Messages posted on the lists reach a wide audience and often stimulate debates among policy makers, parliamentarians, NGO staff and donor agencies. Some lists, such as such as those of the Women’s Movement and the task force of the African Protocol on Women’s Rights, are administered by network members, and the issues raised there are then often used in advocacy campaigns.

Through the Citizen Journalism in Africa project and other training courses, WOUGNET has equipped some of its members with the skills to use web 2.0 social networking tools such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, social bookmarking and media sharing sites. Other courses cover how to write articles, develop audio and video productions and to publish online. This initiative is aimed at encouraging civil society organizations to use and interaction with a variety of media in order to help them maximize their communication strategies and get more from their research.

Remote

In an effort to reach out to members and individuals easily and quickly, WOUGNET uses SMS (short message service). The organization has experimented with a number of different methods of sending messages to large groups of people, including BulkSMS, a web-based application for distributing SMS messages to a group of local subscribers, and FrontlineSMS, a package that can be used to receive and send SMS messages to many mobile phones from a single computer.

WOUGNET has used SMS messages to support campaigns, including International Women’s Day, and to raise awareness of issues of violence against women as part of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence campaign.

With the Enhancing Access to Agricultural Information project, which targets rural women farmers in northern Uganda, the organization uses SMS in combination with a number of other technologies and media including a website, community radio broadcasts and an information centre, the Kubere Information Centre. The project uses this range of technologies to deliver agricultural information to women farmers to help them improve productivity, as well as to provide regular, up-to-date market data to enable them to reach new buyers and thus increase their incomes. SMS messages generated by the participating organizations are translated into the local language, Luo, and sent to the farmers. The women are also able to use the SMS services to contact agricultural experts for advice and to share details about other available information sources.

Not all of WOUGNET’s activities are web-based. The organization has expanded its efforts to include women who have no access to the internet. In partnership with the Uganda Communications Commission, for example, they now hold regional ICT seminars for girls in eastern, northern and western Uganda. They have also recently received support from the NEPAD-Spanish fund for the empowerment of women, to support and improve the incomes of women entrepreneurs in three districts of Uganda - Ibanda, Apac and Mukono. And WOUGNET is now a regional coordinating office for the Dimitra project which helps people in rural communities to develop their ICT skills.

These are just a few examples of how WOUGNET works to improve access to, and the use of, ICTs while also helping to develop and advocate for workable ICT policies. Since its inception in 2001, and that first article in ICT Update in 2002, the organization has grown, and is now implementing a three-year strategy to ensure that it can continue to support women and women’s organizations as they apply and further innovate with all the ICT tools available to them.

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Janet C Achora, senior information officer, and Berna Ngolobe at Women of Uganda Network.

Read the ICT Update article from issue 8, October 2002
View article