Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
INTRODUCTION
LITERATURE REVIEW
ICT and its role in gender equality and empower-
ment in rural areas of developing countries have
been a concern of international donor agencies,
development partners, non-government organi-
zations, and academicians. Despite a growing
understanding of the potential role of ICTs in pro-
moting social inclusion and gender equity, there is
nevertheless a recognized knowledge gap relating
to the impact of ICT initiatives, particularly with
respect to impact on women. This research is an
attempt to contribute to filling this gap by studying
two different ICT projects in rural Bangladesh; the
Grameen Phone Community Information Center
(GPCIC), which provides mobile broadband
connectivity in rural community centers and the
Village Phone (VP), which facilitates small scale
women enterprises through enabling women to
sell mobile phone services in rural communities.
The VP initiative is one way of contributing to
the achievement of the Milennium Development
Goals (MDGs), particularly Target 11, which calls
for an increase in the 'ratio of women to men in
wage employment in the non-agricultural sector'.
This initiative has opened new doors for women
to become entrepreneurs, by providing them with
opportunities to change their socio-economic
condition, thereby overcoming oppression, social
control, and other humiliating features associated
with being a woman in a male-dominated society.
The aim of this research is to illustrate the
impact of these two ICT projects on the lives of
rural women at an individual level. In its simplest
form, an impact assessment is a systematic process
of identifying and analyzing the impact (positive
and negative) of an intervention. A key function
of impact assessments is to enable researchers,
users, and policy makers to compare impacts with
objectives, taking into account the surrounding
social and economic environments and human
contexts, and to identify any unintended impacts.
Noting that there had been insufficient attention
to understanding the impacts of ICT on women
and that few projects initiated by the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) had taken into
account the needs and perspectives of women,
the 1998 World Telecommunication Development
Conference (WTDC) resolved to establish a task
force on gender issues (ITU, 1998). To emphasize
the importance of gender issues, this task force
was converted into a Standing Working Group on
Gender Issues at the WTDC in 2002 (ITU, 2002).
This brought renewed emphasis on training and
education for women in ICT, a theme that recurred
at the World Summit on the Information Society
(WSIS), which emphasized the importance of
training and education of women to motivate and
promote “participation and active involvement of
girls and women in the decision-making process of
building the Information Society” (WSIS, 2005).
Sometimes ICT is an integral part of an orga-
nization's activities, as was the case with the Self
Employed Women's Association (SEWA), India,
which has used many facets of ICT, including
training poor women in the use of video cameras
and other audiovisual equipment, and educating
them via satellite communication about the im-
portance of insurance (Roger & Rajesh, 2006).
In an endeavour to attract women to participate
in its village knowledge centre (VKC) activities,
the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation
(MSSRF) requires that at least one woman is
engaged in the management of each VKC, result-
ing in many of the operators and volunteers in
the VKCs being women. This involvement has
contributed to increasing women's influence and
status, not only from working with the centers,
but also from small enterprise activities associ-
ated with this activity, such as production of
paper and biopesticides (Colle & Roman, 2001;
Ofir & Kriel, 2004). Another example from India
is the 'Putting ICTs in the Hands of Women of
Kanpur and “Chikan” Embroidery Workers of
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