Promoting gender equality? Some development-related uses of ICTs by women

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have created new economic and social opportunities all over the world. Their use, however, continues to be governed by existing power relations whereby women frequently experience relative disadvantage. Amid this inequality are individuals and organisations that are working to use ICTs to further gender equality. These are the issues addressed by the BRIDGE Cutting Edge Pack on Gender and ICTs. The first section of this article consists of extracts from the Overview Report in the Pack. It describes ways in which women have been able to use ICTs to support new forms of information exchange, organisation, and empowerment. The second section, taken from the textbox ‘Telecentres: Some Myths’, describes three assertions which frequently lead to problems in all forms of investment in development-related information exchanges with poor or less powerful groups, not only those relating to telecentres and women.

Acknowledgements

This is an extract from ‘Gender and ICTs: Overview Report’, published in 2004 as a Cutting Edge pack by the Bridge development-gender programme at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Development in Practice thanks the author and Bridge for permission to reproduce these extracts. Information about Bridge may be found at www.bridge.ids.ac.uk. The Pack can be downloaded from www.bridge.ids.ac.uk/reports_gend_CEP.html

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anita Gurumurthy

Anita Gurumurthy is a founder member of ‘IT for Change’ − a network in India that works on ICT for development issues (www.itforchange.net). She is also a member of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN)−a network of Southern feminists. She writes on reproductive health and rights, information and communication technologies (ICTs), and globalisation from a Southern perspective.