Announcements

KAFANCHAN (John Dada, Fantsuam Foundation for APC) - Since January, sectarian strife has ripped through Nigerian communities.  “A mass burial took place the day before yesterday and body counts are close to three hundred with over 80% of them women and children,” APC member John Dada told APC. “It is ironic that in the month of the Celebration of Women’s Day, such atrocities are being visited on innocent women and children.” Women are culturally respected as the givers of life and John blames deepening poverty and economic alienation for the cultural reversal but he sees a potential solution.Read more

It was by coincidence that 29 year-old software developer Huda Sarfraz got involved in the Dareecha project. The project, which aims to bring the internet to rural school children and teachers, helped young girls and boys in Pakistan's rural communities learn to use and create content on the internet. Contrary to their expectations, the girls wanted to use the internet just as much as boys did; and despite the additional challenges young girls faced they came in numbers to the extra curricular classes, and were among the winners for the best websites held by the Centre for Research in Urdu Language Processing. The APC's Gender Evaluation Methodology (GEM) also had a part to play in contributing to and measuring the project's success.Read more

CALGARY (LC and KAH for APC) – In rural Pakistan girls schools are sometimes burned to the ground, so when twenty-nine year old Huda Sarfraz and her team started to teach Punjabi girls how to create websites and use online chat, she feared they might be run out of town. However the girls clamoured to learn as much as the boys did and --overturning societal taboos-- over-subscribed for the extra-curricular classes – ending up producing prize-winning websites. As a result of exposure to APC's Gender Evaluation Methodology (GEM), and despite their own cultural reservations, Sarfraz's team focused specifically on getting girls and women teachers involved. “Initially, we only saw two groups to work with -- students and teachers. However because of GEM, we looked at them as four—girl students, boy students, women teachers and men teachers,” says Sarfraz.

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In India’s rural e-governance initiative, 33% of local government seats are reserved for women. Rural village heads of Chhattisgarh State – one of India's poorest-- can now participate in the public process and in theory remotely communicate the needs of their villages through the use of a low-cost computer that does not require computer literacy. But women are not taking the active roles that were expected. Using GEM, APC's gender evaluation methodology, Dr. Anupama Saxena and her team are finding out why winning an electoral seat does not necessarily guarantee that your voice is heard within the governance system if you are a woman.

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In rural Uganda, telecentres that have been established to promote rural access to information and foster development are not getting the results they had hoped for. Using the APC WNSP's Gender Evaluation Methodology (GEM) to understand why this is so, UgaBYTES, a Uganda-based NGO that works to promote access to ICTs in rural East Africa, has found that beyond the common obstacles to access like technical infrastructure, connection costs and computer literacy, women face numerous additional barriers if they want to use ICTs to improve their lives.Read more

Findings from gender evaluations on ICT use, point to the fact that women over the age of 35 are often times considered “too old” to use ICTs and learn about computer technology. This is especially true in rural areas of Latin America, where women over 35 complain that their children in particular think that they are not fit to surf the internet because of their age, and that it would be hard for them to learn to send emails and handle computer software.Read more