Document(s) 4 of 12

A concern for gender and development emerged on the international scene in the 1970s. As this concern matured, linkages developed between this and other major development concerns — science and technology (S&T), development information, and, most recently, information and communication technologies (ICTs) — as a focus in the development community. Only in the last 5 years have two concepts begun to converge: that of ICTs and development and that of gender and development (until the late 1980s, women in development [WID]). The critical mass of activity in this area in Africa has taken place only in the past 2 years.

This chapter looks at the ways these themes have emerged and converged historiographically and thereby develops a clearer understanding of the analysis of gender and ICTs in Africa.

Women in development

Nearly 25 years ago, the field of WID (as it was then known) was beginning to take on an institutional and operational form in Africa; 1975 marked the first United Nations–organized world conference on women: the International Women’s Year conference in Mexico City. Of all the regions of the world represented at this conference, only Africa had a regional program at that time — the Women’s Programme of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), started in 1971 and based in Addis Ababa. The tremendous energy from the conference led to the declaration of the United Nations Decade for Women, 1976–85. In the United Nations in Africa, this energy transformed the existing unstructured program of activities for women into the African Training and Research Centre for Women (ATRCW) in 1975, a unit within the Social Development Division of ECA (Snyder and Tadesse 1995).

ATRCW began working in the area of WID with a focus on women’s economic and political roles in the context of human–resource development. Before this, numerous programs had been directed to helping women in the African region. However, before ATRCW, the emphases had been on

• A home and family approach, which most often followed a Western, almost Victorian, home-economics model; and

• A social-welfare approach, which saw women as passive recipients of development benefits and emphasized family planning because of women’s reproductive roles.

From its founding, ATRCW’s approach to women in Africa emphasized human-resource development, based on

• Recognition of women’s productive roles as active participants in the economy; and

• Identity of the goals of human-resource development and the goals of development in general (the full participation of women is essential to development).

Technology concerns in WID

Ester Boserop’s very important book Woman’s Role in Economic Development (Boserop 1970) stressed that new technologies introduced in Africa, as well as in other developing areas, had been generally displacing the labour of women. Her research marked the beginning of the intellectual examination of the effects of new technologies on women’s jobs and the opening of debates about gender gaps in technology. It also moved beyond the view generally held at that time that technologies are gender neutral and that their use is equally available to men and women. Despite Boserop’s seminal work, governments and many development agencies continued to adhere to the view that technology is gender neutral, that there is no such thing as gender-based technology (despite obvious societal gender differences), and that the arrival of technology is an unquestionable panacea.

Early in the work of the ECA Women’s Programme, concern emerged about the relationship between technology and women’s economic and social roles. In its first years, the ECA Women’s Programme attempted to look at the relationship between women and technology, publishing, for example, “The Impact of Modern Life and Technology on Women’s Economic Role: Implications for Planning” (ECA–FAO–SIDA 1972). The crowning piece in this area was the landmark publication of Marilyn Carr’s Appropriate Technology for African Women (Carr 1977). However, because information technology remained a specialized tool of computer programmers in the world of mainframes and minicomputers, whose numbers in Africa were highly limited, there was no interest at that time in raising questions about its relevance to African women.

S&T for development

Applications of S&T for development took on institutional forms at the regional level in Africa in the 1970s, at about the same time as WID was emerging as a major development focus. In 1973, the ECA Conference of Ministers responsible for economic development and planning adopted the S&T component of the African Strategy for Development and approved the African Regional Plan for the Application of Science and Technology to Development. This was to be implemented by the Intergovernmental Committee of Experts for Science and Technology for Development. This committee has met biennially since the mid-1970s.

S&T examines the gender element

By the early 1980s, the first concerns about the relationship between gender and S&T for development began to emerge in Africa. The leaders were the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). They each worked with ECA to develop projects in Africa in this area. The institutional focal points of these activities were generally in the women’s programs, rather than in the S&T units. In the initial years, emphasis was on encouraging young girls to stay in school and study S&T.

A significant publication in this area in the late 1980s was Patricia Stamp’s Technology, Gender, and Power in Africa (Stamp 1989), which examined the relationship between gender and technology in Africa. It was published following a meeting in 1989, organized jointly by the Rockefeller Foundation and IDRC, on Gender, Technology and Development: a Diagnosis of Available Literature. In the foreword to the book, Eva M. Rathgeber remarked on one of the key findings of the meeting, that “for most women in the developing world, technology has failed” (Rathgeber 1989, p. vii). This was thought to stem from the fact that technologies are not gender neutral but rather are value laden from beginning to end and that most technologies destined for women in Africa have been produced by Western men who do not understand the social, economic, or cultural contexts for use of these technologies.

In addition to expounding the view that technology, to date, had generated negative consequences for women in Africa, Stamp (1089) brought together an analysis of WID research, feminist political economy, and the vast literature on technology transfer. She felt that no one had conceptualized the relationship between gender and technology. On the positive side, however, she noted that when women in Africa accepted technology transfer, these technologies empowered them; and that women’s organizations and the social structure reconfigured themselves to the requirements of the new technologies.

Although the relationship had not been conceptualized, Stamp (1989) delineated 10 issues in the relationship between gender and technology in Africa. Three of these issues are especially relevant to gender and ICTs:

• Governments and development agencies treat technologies as neutral, value-free tools and assume that the adoption of these technologies will naturally lead to development;

• Governments and development agencies tend to ignore women’s relationships to technology; and

• Women have unequal access to development resources (of which information has, at the end of the 20th century, come to be regarded as primary, equivalent to land and capital).

• Agenda 21, the recommendations of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (in 1992);

• The Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing) Platform for Action (in 1995);

• The gender activities of the Science in Africa Programme of the American Association for the Advancement of Science;

• The Board on Science and Technology for International Development of the US National Research Council;

• The Forum of African Women Educationalists, for their innovative program to teach S&T to girls in Africa;

•  IDRC;

• The International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study, through their Gender, Science and Development Programme;

• Intermediate Technology for Development Group, through its Africa Office;

• The International Gender, Science and Technology Information Map (WGST 1998);

• The International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women;

• The International Women’s Tribune Center;

• The Third World Organisation of Women in Science and Technology, which promotes the role of women in science and development in the South (its 1999 meeting in Johannesburg was notable for the amount of attention paid to gender and ICTs in Africa);

• UNESCO, particularly through World Science;

• The S&T programs of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM); and

• The social-exclusion studies of the United Nations University Institute for New Technologies, in Maastricht.

The emergence of development information

In the late 1970s, another development area emerged in Africa that would contribute to the linkage of gender and ICTs for development information. Again, IDRC contributed significantly to the intellectual origins of the work in this area. In 1975, IDRC began work on DEVSIS, a database of indexed and abstracted development information linked to the MINISIS software for bibliographic information management and using Hewlett–Packard minicomputers.¹ Developing regions were encouraged to adopt this system of information management for decision-makers and planners. With assistance from IDRC, as well as from UNESCO and UNDP, the Pan African Documentation and Information System came into existence at ECA in Addis Ababa in 1979. (In 1987, the name was changed to the Pan African Development Information System (PADIS) to reflect the expansion of its scope beyond that of a bibliographic database.) From its origins, the link with S&T was explicit: the system was to include both S&T and socioeconomic information. Also, from its origin, the link between development information as a field and ICTs was implicit: the system’s success was tied to both computers and communication satellites (which, unfortunately, would not become available for development-information communication networks in Africa for another 20 years). However, these elements were not emphasized, nor was there any explicit articulation for ICTs as tools for development until 1990, when the personal-computer revolution began to reach Africa.

Women and development information

The first African regional effort to link gender, development information, and information technology came in 1989, when ATRCW and PADIS at ECA (with the support of UNIFEM and the Ford Foundation) organized an Expert Group Meeting on the Establishment of a Data Bank on Women in Development in Africa. The meeting brought together men and women from some 25 African countries (from Tunisia, to Ethiopia, to Mozambique, to Senegal) from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and public-sector organizations dealing with information on WID. The need to use information technology was explicit both in the background papers (“Model for the Establishment of a Data Bank and Women’s Information Network for Africa”) and in the country papers.² Regrettably, despite intense interest during the meeting, the necessary funding was never raised to establish the network. However, the work of the expert group has been taken up again in the late 1990s by the Gender in Africa Information Network, with its Information and Communication Technology Working Group, under the leadership of the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town. This network, coordinated by Jennifer Radloff, is a major promoter of using ICTs to empower women through the dissemination of information on gender and development. Its electronic discussion list (gain@lists.sn.apc.org) is extremely active, informative, and stimulating.

IDRC further articulated the relationship between gender and development information in Gender and Information: A Strategy for Integrating Gender Issues into the Work of the Information Sciences and Systems Division (IDRC 1993).
 

ICTs emerge as major theme in S&T

With the emergence of globalization, which is essentially based in communications, ICTs did not remain a subset of S&T but became the more important field by the mid-1990s, almost eclipsing the work done in the previously larger main field. Increasingly, scholars and practitioners were looking at ways to use these new tools to accelerate social and economic development and produce sustainable development. The definitive book on this subject, covering all aspects of the field, has been Robin Mansell and Uta Wehn’s Knowledge Societies — Information Technology for Sustainable Development (Mansell and Wehn 1998), which comes directly out of the S&T-for-development milieu. (The authors are both associated with the Science Policy Research Unit of the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, in the United Kingdom.)

The first linkages between gender and ICTs for development started with the work of NGONET, in preparation for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development’s Earth Summit, in Rio, 1992. NGONET’s aim was to use ICTs to give women and groups from the South a chance to use an innovative process of information exchange to express their views to a global development forum. In 1993, NGONET inspired the creation of the Women’s Programme of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), which played a similar role for the Beijing World Conference on Women in 1995 (APC 1997). The APC Women’s Programme was based on solid analysis of feminist perspectives on technology and communications; its emphasis was on giving women the experience of ICTs. The APC Women’s Programme defined itself as a global initiative to facilitate women’s access to, and use of, computer communications. Its main task was to “demystify” ICTs for women.

Despite an almost routine linking of gender with other development issues by this time, this did not happen easily with ICTs. In 1995, the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD) of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, through its Advanced Technology Assessment System, published the volume Information Technology for Development (United Nations 1995). Although its stated aim was to deal, inter alia, with the social impacts of the diffusion and application of information technology and comprehensively cover the field of information technology for development, the book made no mention of gender issues. This was surprising, as it did consider such topics as unemployment, marginalization, and economic and social exclusion, which have very important gender dimensions. Furthermore, in 1993, shortly after its founding, UNCSTD had adopted the theme of gender as one of those it would address over the next 2 years.

Geoffrey Oldham, the farsighted member of UNCSTD who proposed the inclusion of gender, noted that the suggestion was adopted only after much debate, as many members of UNCSTD thought that gender had little to do with S&T. Professor Oldham subsequently chaired UNCSTD’s Gender Working Group (GWG). The GWG made extensive recommendations to governments, international organizations, NGOs, and the private sector on implementing policies to promote a more gender-equitable approach to S&T (UNCSTD–GWG 1995).

The emergence of gender and ICTs

In 1995, Missing Links (UNCSTD–GWG 1995) provided the first comprehensive documentation of the links between gender and ICTs with specific reference to developing countries. In an article by IDRC’s Gender and Information Working Group (GIWG), “Information as a Transformative Tool: The Gender Dimension,” the IDRC team (led by Martha Stone) argued that acquiring information and knowledge is the first step to change and underlined the growing role of ICTs in this process:
 

The flow of information and the associated information and communication technologies (ICTs) constitute a fundamental component of science and technology (S&T). Advances in ICTs are having an increasingly profound effect on the landscape of human activity.

The GIWG proceeded to define the major points of intersection between ICTs and gender, S&T, and development. ICTs can be said to

•  Influence the content and mechanisms whereby women (and men) in developing countries learn about S&T;

•  Constitute an increasingly significant component of S&T — ICTs have the potential to enhance the ability of women (and men) to learn, interact, and participate; and

•  Have profound implications for women (and men) in terms of employment, education, training, and other aspects of productive life.

The GIWG’s conclusion was that the new ICTs had the potential to strengthen the role of women as both participants in development and beneficiaries of it, following which it made extensive recommendations for the participation of women in an information society, as well as suggestions for research and policy in developing countries (IDRC–GIWG 1995).

The Global Knowledge Conference, held in Toronto, 1997 (GK97) and organized by the World Bank and the Government of Canada, was also very important to the promotion of a link between gender and ICTs. When the agenda for this conference was first drawn up, virtually no references were made to gender. However, as gender emerged as a vital theme in the electronic discussion list that preceded the conference (one of the first examples of the impact of electronic democracy!), its organizers quickly responded by giving substantial space to the gender issue throughout the conference. GK97 gave women a platform to advocate an increase in their share in the benefits of the information-technology revolution and to argue for “connectivity for all.”

Gender and ICTs in Africa

The first operational activities associating gender and ICTs in Africa appeared in widely scattered parts of the continent in 1995 and 1995, in Kenya, South Africa, and Senegal. These activities predated the fifth World Conference on Women in Beijing, where most of the African ICT activists were involved. The activities all had an NGO base and an association with the APC Women’s Programme. These included the activities of Environment, Development, Action (ENDA)–Dakar, Eco News Africa, and SANGONeT, which are well documented in this volume.

As women began to articulate the issues for the region, as in this volume, the arguments paralleled those used to encourage the participation of the region as a whole in the information age: that the information age offers opportunities to African women to catch up technologically and leapfrog over other developments they had missed and that if African women do not participate in it, they will find themselves further marginalized (Knight 1995). They also argued for women’s recognition of the importance of ICTs on the basis of their need for empowerment, inclusion in ICT human-resource development, and access to the new technologies (Marcelle 1997). Arguments were also made about the value of these tools in strengthening women’s economic and political roles. Rather than simply accepting and using the tools as they became available, it was suggested that African women use and transform them to create an information society to accommodate their needs, aspirations, and vision (Marcelle 1999).

In 1996, the ECA Conference of African Ministers responsible for economic and social development and planning adopted the African Information Society Initiative (AISI). Gender concerns were explicitly set out, with the idea that women were both users and providers of information and the idea that gender cut across all of AISI’s major themes: policy, infrastructure, connectivity, human-resource development, and content creation. ECA and its partners in AISI implementation (Partnership for Information and Communication Technologies in Africa [PICTA] [ECA 1996]) have undertaken significant gender-focused activities through the theme of democratizing access to the information society, a major theme of AISI (see also the AISI 1993; PICTA 1998).

The area in the linkage of gender and ICTs that has received the least attention in Africa to date is the role of women in the information economy — the jobs and economic opportunities created by ICTs, whether used in the primary information sector (telecommunications and informatics industry, software, libraries, etc.) or used to enhance productivity and growth in other sectors. In other regions of the world, the information economy has opened up employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for women (for example, in information processing, teleworking, and rental of telephones, as with Grameen Telecommunications). However, in Asia, the advent of ICT-related industries has slotted women into low-paid jobs with long hours (Mitter and Rowbotham 1995). Outside the most visible spheres of penetration, in which women are much more likely to be secretaries using computers than systems analysts and programmers, the examples in Africa are not widespread enough to have economic significance (that is, the women in Ghana and Senegal who own and operate phone shops and the woman in Malawi who owns an Internet service provider company). Although the topic of the possibilities for development of a knowledge-based economy in Africa is yet to be explored in any depth, either in its gender dimension or overall, it remains an important one for the future.

Including the publication of this volume, there is now a critical mass of activities on gender and ICTs in Africa. The ECA 40th Anniversary Conference on African Women and Economic Development: Investing in Our Future presented the issue to more than 1000 decision-makers and planners from Africa and reached even more through the Afr-fem electronic discussion list that both preceded and continued after the conference.

After a resolution of the April 1998 World Conference on Telecommunications Development, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) established a gender and telecommunications working group, in which African issues were well represented (Women’sNet 1999). The Gender in African Information Network continues to grow as a force attracting women to the use of ICTs (GAIN 1998). Numerous projects are under way as part of the telecentre movement to see that the new information mechanisms provide access for women and meet their needs in Africa. Notable in this area are the efforts of IDRC’s Acacia Initiative, which works with the South African Universal Service Agency to establish telecentres in South Africa, with particular attention to the needs and participation of women. The Center for Information Society and Development in Africa has an active gender working group that conducts training, with Abantu for Development, on women, connectivity, and ICT policy issues. At the conclusion of the ECA conference, the APC issued a communiqué underlining what it regarded as the key issues on gender and ICTs in Africa (APC 1988). These issues were

• Enabling environment — Women and other members of civil society need to join forums to convince policymakers of the importance of an enabling environment in which communication and communication technologies can flourish;

• ICTs in education — ICTs must be part of the curriculums for girls and boys everywhere in Africa from an early age;

• Content production — Men and women should be encouraged to develop content relevant to their interests and needs;

• Information facilitators — Owing to the growing complexity of the technology, information facilitators are needed to interface with communities to help them meet their information needs; and

• Private-sector commitment to sustainable development — As a vital partner in extending connectivity in Africa, the private sector needs to realize the importance of access to ICTs for all groups in society, including women.

What is the future of ICTs for women in Africa? Many have credited the new technologies with great liberating potential. The Internet has been described as gender neutral (so long as the author uses initials instead of a first name or a gender title) and a participation-promoting technology with the ability to transcend hierarchy and patriarchy. Women in rural communities can make links from the local to the global in their work, provided they have access to ICTs in terms of both the technologies and the tools to use them (which include both computer and major-language literacy). The vision is that women in Africa will take advantage of this medium, fitting it into their economic, social, and cultural context, to empower themselves. Certainly, the African women at Beijing have provided many examples of this (through Women’sNet), and more stunningly innovative uses are coming out of Africa every month, such as the ECO News Africa project. It uses solar-powered FM radios to assist pastoral women in the Ilaramatak-Orkonerei community of Simanjiro District, Tanzania, in sharing indigenous knowledge and practices.

The converse side of the argument is that the new technologies are not gender neutral. Women in Africa will find them difficult to access, and they will not have the time, the tools, or the income to master them. As men become more conscious of the power and global dominance of these tools, they will act more to ensure that men dominate their use and become dominant in the information economy derived from the use of these tools. The pessimistic view sees ICTs as new tools to enforce and exacerbate social inequality. Left alone, societal forces will prevail, and women will get left behind.

Without the efforts of the women whose writings are included in this book and those of the activists working diligently to put these tools into the hands of women across the region, the pessimistic scenario may become reality. However, women and women’s organizations are becoming more aware of the importance of ICTs for empowering women. One of the pioneers of these activities, Marie-Hélène Mottin-Sylla, of ENDA–Dakar, won a global award for her efforts to bring electronic connectivity to women in francophone Africa. In early 1999, the Gates Foundation approved a grant for WomenConnect!, a project worth 1 million US dollars. The aim of WomenConnect! is to provide connectivity to rural women in Africa, with particular attention to women working on issues in health and environmental protection. Through the activism of individuals, groups, and institutions such as the Gates Foundation, women in Africa can and will exploit these technologies to meet their needs and improve the quality of their lives.

References

AISI (African Information Society Initiative). 1999. African Information Society Initiative. United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Internet: www.bellanet.org/partners/aisi

APC (Association for Progressive Communications). 1997. Findings—global networking for change: experiences from the APC Women’s Programme. APC, San Francisco, CA, USA.

——— 1998. APC Africa communique, 4 June 1998. APC, San Francisco, CA, USA.

Boserop, E. 1970. Woman’s role in economic development. St Martin’s Press, London, UK.

Carr, M. 1977. Appropriate technology for African women. African Training and Research Centre for Women, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

ECA (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa). 1996. The African Information Society Initiative (AISI): a framework to build Africa’s information and communication infrastructure. ECA, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Internet: www.bellanet.org/partners/aisi/more/ aisi

ECA–FAO–SIDA (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; Swedish International Development Authority). 1972. The impacts of modern life and technology on women’s economic role: implications for planning. ECA, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

GAIN (Gender in Africa Information Network). 1998. Report of a Gender in Africa Information Network (GAIN) workshop for the information and communication technology technical group. GAIN, Cape Town, South Africa.

Hafkin, N.J.; Bay, E.G. 1976. Women in Africa: studies in social and economic change. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, USA.

IDRC (International Development Research Centre). 1993. Gender and information: a strategy for integrating gender issues into the work of the Information Sciences and Systems Division. IDRC, Ottawa, ON, Canada.

IDRC–GIWG (International Development Research Centre Gender and Information Working Group). 1995. Information as a transformative tool: the gender dimension. In United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development Gender Working Group, ed., Missing links: gender equity in science and technology for development. IDRC, Ottawa, ON, Canada. pp. 163–172.

Knight, P.; Baranshamajee, E.; Booshlog, E.R.; Brajovic, V.P.; Clemant-Jones, R.A.; Hawkins, R.J. 1995. Increasing Internet connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa — issues, options and World Bank group role. World Bank, Washington, DC, USA.

Mansell, R; Wehn, U. 1998. Knowledge societies — information technology for sustainable development. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Marcelle, G.M. 1997. Using information technology to strengthen African women’s oganisations. Abantu for Development, London, UK.

——— 1999. Creating an African women’s cyberspace. In Mitter, S., ed., Social exclusion in the information society. Routledge, London, UK. (In press.)

Mitter, S.; Rowbotham, S. 1995. Women encounter technology: perspectives of the Third World. Routledge, London, UK.

PICTA (Partnership for Information and Communication Technologies). 1998. PICTA. United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Internet: www.bellanet.org/partners/picta

Rathgeber, E. 1989. Foreword. In Stamp, P., Technology, gender, and power in Africa. International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, ON, Canada. pp. vi–xi.

Snyder, M.C.; Tadesse, M. 1995. African women and development: a history. Zed, London, UK.

Stamp, P. 1989. Technology, gender, and power in Africa. International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, ON, Canada.

UNCSTD–GWG (United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development Gender Working Group), ed. 1995. Missing links: gender equity in science and technology for development. International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, ON, Canada.

United Nations. 1995. Information technology for development. United Nations, New York, NY, USA.

WGST (Women in Global Science and Technology). 1998. International gender, science and technology information map. WGST, Grifton, ON, Canada. Internet: www.wigsat.org/ GSTPMap.html

Women’sNet. 1999. Women’sNet. SANGONeT, Johannesburg, South Africa. Internet: www.womensnet.org.za

¹ Mention of a proprietary name does not constitute endorsement of the product and is given only for information. Return
² Expert Group Meeting on the Establishment of a Data Bank on Women in Development, Addis Ababa, 15–19 May 1989 (unpublished). The papers, which are a rich source of information, are in the PADdev database, available from UNECA, P.O. Box 3001, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; fax: +251 1 51 05 12; e-mail: eca-info@un.org. Return

Document(s) 4 of 12