huridocs-tech Use of Electronic Communication for Women's Rights

This message was posted to the UNIFEM Virtual Working Group to End
Violence Against Women.

>Date: Wed, 04 Nov 1998 09:54:13
>To: end-violence@edc-cit.org
>From: Marie-Helene Mottin-Sylla <mhms@enda.sn>
>Subject: [end-violence] Use of Electronic Communication for Women's Rights
>Sender: owner-end-violence@edc-cit.org
>Reply-To: end-violence@edc-cit.org
>
>Greetings from Dakar,
>
>I would have liked to post before to the list, but we were busy running a
>training workshop on "electronic solidarity for women's groups in
>francophone Africa". The fact is that since some years, we discovered the
>huge potential of electronic communication for women in development. Our
>team, SYNFEV (Synergy Gender and Development), an entity of the
>international NGO ENDA Third World, was acting on issues of economic
>autonomy, health and rights for women. We made the choice then to support
>the work of women's organisations active in francophone Africa on these
>issues, by providing them skills and technical support around these new
>tools for development, in order that they can take advantage of them. 
>
>Among different activities, we have attended many cases where women and
>women's groups were claiming their rights through information and
>communication technologies (ICTs). Some of them were concerning African
>women, and the solidarity campaigns raised for that purpose proved to be
>successful. The only thing is that most often the call for solidarity was
>mainly answered to by non-African women's groups, and sometimes, the local
>African women's groups that should have their voice heard on some case
>were not even aware of the case and/or campaign happening. Most of these
>African women's groups, very active locally, do not have a computer, a
>modem, and even less the training and the technical support adapted to
>their needs. A campaign that we happened to launch (through ICTs and other
>means of communication) about a religious condemnation of an African
>film-maker for a film she made on FGM, has been so successful that it
>became clear to us that in order to be able to fight violence, women
>should be given the means to network electronically and act in solidarity
>for the defense of women's rights violations. 
>
>To that end, a joint project was elaborated by Women Living Under Muslim
>Laws Network (Africa and Middle East Office) and ENDA-SYNFEV. We agreed
>that we have to make two separate workshops, one for the francophone
>African participants and one for the anglophone participants, but all the
>conception process is made in common, and the final output will be
>implemented in common too. The ICT tools make rather irrelevant, to our
>minds, to work inside national or local boundaries - for us it seems more
>important to gather people who share the same contexts or interests. But
>in the communication field, language is a real frontier, which justify the
>need for two different language workshops. 
>
>The francophone face-to-face meeting duration was five days, but in
>reality the participants meet virtually two months in advance through an
>electronic conference we set up for that purpose. The preliminary
>electronic conference has been a real asset for the workshop as when the
>participants came face-to-face the collective work had already begun. The
>basic criteria for participating to the workshop was that the
>representative of the women's organisation would be able to use electronic
>mail. We happen to realise, then, that most of them did know how to send
>and receive a message, but still ignored the other functions of email
>(classify the information, make collective discussion, settle different
>types of list according to the characteristics of many kinds of list, how
>to navigate the World Wide Web, how to look for information on the WWW and
>circulate it by email to lists, and so on). Some were very impressed to
>discover so many sites on the Web that promote violence at different
>levels, whereas African women have so little place and voice on the Web.
>
>Thus the objective of promoting electronic communication and networking
>skills, which was initially a marginal objective of the workshop, became a
>fundamental one. The other objective was to raise the ability of
>participants to organise and participate in electronic solidarity
>campaigns for women's rights. This was done using cases studies drafted
>from cases that the organisations have to deal with on a daily basis in
>their own contexts and lead to a general overview of how to organise a
>plan of action and a collective action. We have particularly stressed the
>preliminary points on information verification, security issues and
>identifying ally networks and potentially supportive organisations. To be
>very frank, I have the feeling that the work is not finished on that
>point : I mean we have not produced a "ready to use" manual on how to
>organise and participate to electronic solidarity campaigns. We had the
>real advantage to benefit from the experience of resource organisations
>who do organise electronic solidarity campaigns for the defense of human
>rights worldwide, namely Human Rights Watch, Organisation Mondiale Contre
>la Torture, Association for Progressive Communication Women's Programme
>and Women Living Under Muslim Laws International Office. We translated in
>French and distributed highly focused documents that we were granted
>permission to translate and use for that purpose, produced by other
>organisations that we are working with electronically.
>
>During the workshop we used two tools : temporary electronic addresses for
>participants and a special temporary electronic conference. Thus the
>participants were able to share by email all the informations they
>gathered, post their own contributions for the other members' attention,
>discuss the common documents that we wanted to produce collectively, reply
>to information requests given as practical exercises, and even - this was
>a real tip for them - forward to their permanent address the documents,
>informations, URLs and so on, that they found interesting and wanted to
>keep. Most of them have fully appreciated not to be overloaded with paper
>documents when going home, leaving place in their luggage for other gifts
>for their families and relations at home (which is a must in our region).
>
>In order not be too long on this issue, I will not tell about many other
>points that have raised our interest and enriched our experience. I would
>most welcome comments and suggestions from other members of this list. In
>particular, I would like to know if other activities of this kind have
>been realised elsewhere in the world. In brief, the outcome and analysis
>of the francophone workshop will be input in the anglophone workshop soon
>to come, and we will decide in common of the follow up. Among the
>recommendations made by the participants is the continuation of the
>electronic list in order for them to continue to be able to act in
>solidarity, as well as the wish that electronic communications facilities
>would be available in the future in the regional foras about women and
>development issues. Thus the women's NGOs will be able to maintain their
>activities when they attend meetings, as well as immediately provide and
>identify informations about the issues discussed in the foras. In that
>field, we would need the support of the international organisations
>working for women and development, for inserting this kind of action and
>facilities in their programmes from their conception. 
>
>We did not really organise this joint workshop series with government
>representatives, as it was focusing on NGOs and undertaken by NGOs. But we
>have had the support of the local public services interested in women's as
>well as in telecommunications issues, and they expressed their full
>interest for the initiative. The fact is that Internet is very new in our
>region, and most of the expansion efforts are targeted towards
>*institutional* use of ICTs. My recommandation would be that more support
>would be given to the use of ICTs by women's groups, civil society and
>NGOs as they have a great role to play for ending violence.
>
>Marie Helene Mottin-Sylla
>ENDA-SYNFEV
>APC-Africa-Women
>
>


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