Reducing the gender gap in access to ICT: some African initiatives towards change

In March of this year, the ITU and UNESCO-sponsored Broadband Commission for Digital Development met in Mexico City to endorse a new report coordinated by UNESCO, entitled ‘Technology, Broadband and Education: Advancing the Education for All Agenda’.

At the meeting, an ambitious target was set to reduce the gender gap that persists in terms of access and use of the internet, with a new advocacy target: “…to ensure gender equality in broadband access by 2220..”. This is against the backdrop of general recognition that a huge amount of work is required if the Millennium Development Goals of ‘Universal Primary Education’ and ‘Education for All’ are to be achieved. As an article from the UNESCO website on the meeting in March states:-

‘…Less than three years away from the target date for achieving these goals, 61 million children of primary-school age, and a further 71 million of lower secondary-school age, are not in school. In addition, close to 793 million adults – 64% of them women – lack literacy skills, with the lowest rates in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia…’

The article continues with reference to data that was presented at the meeting, highlighting a 25% disparity between men and women in terms of those who used the internet, with the figure being far greater in Sub-Saharan Africa, going up to 45%.

Having these stats to hand is hardly necessary to support the argument that much more needs to be done to close the gender gap – or gender divide (as part of the wider ‘digital divide’), in terms of the number of women in comparison to men who have access to the internet, training in ICT and access to ICT resources in developing countries. Thankfully there seems to be far more global recognition that the existing barriers to opportunity afforded to women in these communities, in terms of career development, social empowerment and global self-expression, will continue to perpetuate without a considerable improvement in the level of accessthey have to ICT education and resources.

Here I have highlighted a few examples of some of the projects and initiatives which have tried to tackle these inequalities, in various communities across Africa, which have been featured in the press in the past year.

Akirachix Training Project: Teaching ICT to high school girls from the slums of Nairobi

“Currently, our country is basking in recognition and appreciation of a robust tech. scene, but we only have a handful of women making an impact in this field”

These are the words of Linda Kamau, Akirachix Training Project Lead, in an article on their work in Nairobi in the BizTech Africa website in May of this year. Akirachix are an all-girl ICT organisation who started offering ICT training to a small group of girls from the slums of Nairobi back in 2010, with the project continuing to develop since then. She goes on to explain how they try to help with other issues as part of the initiative, that may be acting as an obstacle to students continued participation in the scheme:

“Teaching the girls about computers and building their appreciation of science is one thing, but we cannot achieve much when they have to withdraw from class to attend to personal issues. We therefore ensure that we facilitate school attendance with things like bus fare so that they don’t miss class, and give them personal effects for proper hygiene…”

As the article explains, in the coming year since publication the group were intent on further enhancing the curricula they could offer to students to include training in financial literacy and psychological support, with a view to gaining recognition and further input from stakeholders such as the Kenya National Examinations Council in the future.

Senegal: Aiming to educate 100 girls in ICT each year

This is the aim of Bitilokho NDiaye, Technical Consultant in charge of Gender Issues at the Senegal Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, from an interview with The Soleil earlier this year.

In the interview, reported online in the Afrique IT News website in April, Bitilokho explained how they want to “…encourage computer access to women by giving them low-cost computers so that they can be trained in communications…” with the aim of “…promoting female entrepreneurship by making sure that that there are SME headed by women.” Summing up the interview, she explained that the scheme had been a success so far, and hoped to present those who had participated and the projects they had undertaken in ICT since attending the training course.

Telecentre Women Campaign: Joint Scheme in Rwanda, Kenya and Zambia to encourage women to embrace technology through ICT training

As reported on the telecentre.org blog last month, since July the Rwanda Telecentre Network (RTN) Southern Africa Telecentre Network (SATNET) and KenTel have been implementing a digital literacy program of training for women in both rural and urban communities. Working in conjunction with Microsoft, the aim if the initiative as explained in the article is to:

‘…empower disadvantaged community women with knowledge of ICTs for personal growth and expanded opportunities for better lives. Hence boost countries’ aspirations of transforming from an agricultural-based economy to a knowledge-based one….’

One of the students who attended the training explained how she was able to benefit from it with the running of the cooperative of 25 women she was involved in, which produced sweaters and scarves:

“we can now use Microsoft Excel to calculate our profits, book keeping, design a flyer to market our product using Ms Word, and prepare a presentation Powerpoint…”

Chipatala Cha Pa Foni (CCPF): Mobile phone-based initiative in Malawi aims to help women responsible for sourcing medical services and facilities for their family and communities

An article earlier this month in the All Africa website, referencing the Malawi News Agency, explains how a recent development is helping women in rural areas of Malawi (with particular reference to the Nkhotakota region) in their search for medical services and health advice, a requirement that affects whole communities but inevitably falls to women to provide a solution for them.

Chipatala Cha Pa Foni (CCPF), which means ‘Health Centre By Phone’ in English, is a scheme that embraces mobile ICT to specifically help those women who have young children, are pregnant or of child-bearing age,  by provided them with vital healthcare information regarding maternal, neonatal and child-health concerns via their mobile phones.

The result of a competition jointly run by the Malawi Ministry of Health and global NGOs Concern Worldwide and Village Reach, the scheme uses contracts between Village Reach and mobile provider Airtel as its technology platform. Through this integration of mobile technology, it has been possible to extend the reach of existing women’s healthcare education programmes to those who need them most.

Village Reach Program Manager Zachanak Jezman explains the CCPF initiative in more detail:

“CCPF has two components, the first one being a toll free case management hotline which allows women of child bearing age, pregnant women and women of under-five children to talk directly to health workers by dialing 54747 on any Airtel number.

“The second component allows the three groups of targeted women to register with CCPF to receive timely and specialized tips and reminders on healthy information,” he said.

During the launch of CCPF in Nkhotakota, the article quotes National Chairman for the Presidential Initiative on Safe Motherhood, Senior Chief Kwataine as he described the launch:

“…a special day for the three targeted groups of women…CCPF is one way of promoting safe motherhood. It provides a platform to interact with (a health) worker for a long period without actually going to the (health) facility…Women who have reservations about going (to health a facility) will also be served. It’s up to us to use it so that Malawi should continue doing well on maternal health…”

ICT for education in Iraq: In search of good news

In a recent announcement from the regional industry news website arabianindustry.com (and also featured on a number of other similar sites), we were told that a deal had been signed to bring the first LTE TDD (Long-Term Evolution Time-Division Duplex) network to Iraq, thus paving the way for 4G capability further down the line. The deal, signed between Tishknet, an Iraqi internet service provider, and the mobile communication giant Ericsson, breaks new ground in the region, bringing high speed mobile connections to Iraqi customers fortunate enough to have the necessary technology to utilise them.

Somewhat inevitably, the services are planned for launch in the Kurdistan region of north east Iraq, which has been a well-documented and celebrated success story compared to much of the country over the last ten years, in terms of its rapid progress in social and economic development. As a BBC article put it back in March of this year:

‘…In the troubled security and political landscape of Iraq, the autonomous northern province of Kurdistan has emerged in the past 10 years as an inspiring success story…’

As most people with an interest beyond general global news stories are aware, let alone those with a specific interest in the region, ‘…troubled security and political landscape…’ is putting it mildly in Iraq, and the success of the Kurdistan region, with its autonomy being initially gained in 1991 and a proud and determined history of self-determination and identity, is the exception to the rule.

So what of the progress in the rest of Iraq, not just in terms of the expansion of telecommunications, but in relation to greater access to ICT-related education, and the increase in opportunities that it can bring? Access to 4G is a ‘nice-to-have’, but is it really what people need, in a country that only five years ago had an unemployment rate of nearly 30% among young people up to the age of 24, and where the fear of violence and death is still an everyday concern for much of the population?  The number of those out of work has ‘improved’ since then, but many argue the improvement is as much down to people giving up looking for work and thus taking themselves out of the equation, because the lack of security and stability continues to make regular work an unsafe and unsustainable option. So, whilst personal security and the safety of their communities is still the primary concern for many Iraqis, it is understandable that specific concerns about education, both at school age and college level, and in terms of the focus of this blog (that is, the expansion of ICT through education and the opportunities and benefits that can bring), are not perhaps their top priority.

That is not to say that people don’t want them to be. Up to 1991, Iraq’s rich cultural history and oil wealth had provided for very high levels of literacy and educational attainment, and had it not been for several periods of civil war, unrest and oppressive crack downs by incumbent regimes (Saddam Hussein, for instance, banned internet access when it started to become widely available), many argue that the country would at least be on a par in terms of education and technological development with the other states in the region.

As it stands, after 2003 there was little infrastructure to support widespread internet access in the country, and those few individuals who had the knowledge and resources to gain access were having to rely on dial-up networks for some time until limited broadband services were put into place, largely through partnerships between government and foreign third-party providers. Added to this, the ruination of the education system resulted in a drought in the ICT educational skillset; first through years of repression which led to much of the academic community leaving the country due to security fears, or in the worse cases facing death or detention, and the subsequent wholesale destruction of educational buildings and infrastructure. As a result of the invasion in 2003 and the aftermath of violence that followed, many schools and educational establishments were destroyed, and with particular resonance here, thanks to the looting and lawlessness that followed the invasion, the vast majority of public-owned ICT resources were also lost.

In his speech to the Geneva International Centre for Justice earlier this year, Dirk Adriaensens summarised this bleak situation, which goes some way to explain why it is taking such a long time for Iraq to recover in this area:

‘…Iraq’s education system, once vaunted as the most advantaged in the region, has suffered a patterned process of degradation and dismantling. Iraqi schools and universities were bombed and destroyed. Under the occupation, according to a report by the United Nations University International Leadership Institute in Jordan, some 84% of Iraq’s institutions of higher education have been burned, looted, or destroyed. Some 2.000 laboratories need to be re-equipped and 30.000 computers need to be procured and installed nationwide….’

Progress and Initiatives

As suggested in the title of this post, good news stories about education, particularly in relation to ICT, are hard to come by when researching on Iraq, but some efforts have clearly been made in order to create an environment in which people can once again flourish and gain the skills they need to take advantage of the new opportunities that ICT can bring, in a safe and hopefully stable environment; and not just in the relatively prosperous region of Kurdistan.

UNESCO recognised the importance of ICT as being central to any modern educational curriculum, and a driver for social prosperity towards improving the lives of Iraqis and their communities. This understanding led to the setting up of the ICT in Education for Iraq project, which began in 2007 and was the first major initiative to try to tackle the problems the country faced in this area. Their awareness of these problems is expressed clearly on their website:

‘…The education system in Iraq, prior to 1991, was one of the best in the region. However, following Iraq’s wars and years of international sanctions, the education sector has suffered greatly. Moreover, the country’s ICT facilities and applications are very weak; most teachers have either very little or no ICT literacy at all, and thus are ill-suited to play their role to help create a new generation of ICT literate students. Delivering ICT in education system in Iraq will help overcome this problem by fostering greater ICT literacy among students, teachers, school principals, and Ministry of Education (MoE) staff. This renewal of Iraq’s educational system is vital because Iraqi youth will determine their country’s future…’

The site goes on to list the progress that has been made in achieving the goals that the project set out. In summary, these mainly consist of a considerable amount of training and development for Iraqi Ministry of Education staff and practitioners, as well as providing more trained teachers and the restructuring and remodelling of areas of the curriculum, so as to take advantage and gain experience from e-learning facilities and similar resources.

More detailed information can be found here: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/iraq-office/education/primary-and-secondary-education/ict-in-education/

The USA International Development Agency (USAID), perhaps for obvious reasons bearing in mind the country’s continued involvement in the country since the invasion in 2003, has also been heavily involved in various developmental and humanitarian efforts, and these have focussed in part on the improvement and rebuilding of the educational infrastructure. Under the banner ‘Ensuring Iraqi Communities Benefit from Local Oil Wealth’ USAID’s Yana Spasojevic documents the efforts made towards rebuilding through their assistance of local community action groups, in her blog post from April last year:

‘…USAID’s Community Action Program has fostered partnerships between Iraqi communities, local governments, and other stakeholders that have empowered over 160 community action groups to implement more than 630 projects focused at restoration of essential services in southern Iraq since 2008. Iraqi community groups have rebuilt schools, bridges, and roads, and have promoted entrepreneurship, the use of information technology, and sports. These efforts have benefitted and improved lives of over two million people in southern Iraq…’

The rest of the blog post can found here: http://blog.usaid.gov/2012/04/ensuring-iraqi-communities-benefit-from-local-oil-wealth/

There have been other initiatives, mainly by similar organisations (The British Council, for instance, have provided significant assistance to support existing initiatives in teacher training and school standards), but perhaps because of the complex and continuing high-risk security situation in the country, there is little to speak of in terms of positive, personal accounts at a local level of improvements in access to ICT education, or improved connectivity and digital infrastructure making a difference to people’s lives, the like of which I have focussed on elsewhere. This is a great pity, considering the once proud nation in terms of its cultural and educational sophistication that Iraq was.

What I hope is that like many of other locations I have ‘visited’ through this blog, I can look again at Iraq in the not too distance future, and refer to some real ‘good news’ stories, written by people on the ground who’s accounts show a country that has moved on enough from its civil strife to provide its people with freely available education in new and emerging technologies, that can help to improve their lives and those of their communities. Practical education, that can equip them with the ICT skills needed to open doors, develop home-grown solutions to the challenges the country faces, and take advantage of the opportunities that the world has to offer, in a safer, more secure environment.