Making Women's Voices and Votes Count An ICT-based strategy

2013-14

An India-based initiative supported by

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

Genesis of the Project

Rooted in the insights emerging from IT for Change's decade long quest for a Southern feminist idiom of technology.

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.

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

Insight 3: The importance of public access and the woman infomediary

● Assisted public access crucial for marginalised women to be active citizens (TASCHA 2013)

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

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

Project Strategy 1

Strengthening linkages between elected women leaders and marginalised women's

collectives

● IVRS for networking geographically dispersed women's collectives

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

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

Project Strategy 2

Women-run ICT-enabled information centres to help marginalised groups access entitlements

Role of information centres

● Info requests abt local government functioning

● Entitlement claims related to food security, social security benefits,and rural livelihoods

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

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

Project Strategy 3

Community radio and community video for citizenship education

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

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

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.

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).

● 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...

● Acknowledging the promise that ICTs offer, for challenging traditional barriers to women's public-political participation

For more details...

● Visit www.itforchange.net● Write to us!

itfc@itforchange.net