Live notes at the research seminar Gender Evaluation for Social Change by Chat Garcia Ramilo, Coordinator of the Association for Progressive Communications Women’s Networking Support Programme, Manila (Philippines). Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Castelldefels (Barcelona), Spain, May 12th, 2009.
Gender Evaluation for Social Change
Chat Garcia Ramilo
Why gender evaluation? Evidence showed that ICT4D did not integrate gender considerations, though evidence also shows that effectiveness and impact of development projects increases if gender is integrated in design, planning and evaluation.
Gender Evaluation Methodology
Based on participatory action research.
- Testing and development of a gender evaluation tool for ICT4D projects: teleworking, ICT training projects, telecenters, etc.
- Capacity building in gender evaluation: telecenters, rural ICT projects, ICT policy processes and localization (of content)
Findings and challenges
- a gap in capacity for analysis and evaluation of gender-based inequalities
- weak focus on gender in project design, implementatoin and policy formulation
- how to develop evaluative thinking about gender and ICT4D, and use it to shape new gender practices within the ICT4D sector? how to make it in a participatory action research framework?
How gender makes a difference in ICT4D and access to the Information Society:
- Comparative access to infrastructures by women and men are determined by income levels
- Capacity affected by literacy and education levels
- Services affected by relevance of service, mobility, safety issues
- Governance affected by opportunities for participation in policy processes
These aspects have to be taken into consideration if one is to design an ICT4D project in a specific place. The design of this project will sensibly be different depending on how gender is affecting the former issues.
But gender is not only about “women issues”, but also about social and cultural variables, how do the interplay of these variables impact on women and men.
The Pallitathya model
The Pallitathya help line Blangladesh center is a help desk service which consists in five basic components:
- local content
- multiple channels of information and knowledge sharing
- intermediation or infomediation, human interface between information and knowledge-base
- ownership
- mobilisation and marketing
This project’s desing helped women with specific queries (related to gender) or with lower literacy rates to reach a knowledge that, had the ICt4D project been designed in a different way, they would most probably have missed.
Philippine Community e-Centers
Telecenters in peri-urban areas. Though in absolute terms there were not much difference in usage rates amongst women and men, difference could be seen in how the telecenters were used and what values they assigned to them. For instance, women used the telecenters as ways to meet people, as ways to socialize. There were also differences in patterns of access and utilization in relation to age, education and income.
Fantsuam’s Zittnet Service — Nigeria’s first Community Wireless Network
To increase female uptake of the Internet, especially in rural areas.
Coverage of signal was not the issue, but hardware and high costs of bandwidth. Still, even if coverage was good, women had to travel to the centers, and this was a barrier for uptake, as also was low literacy levels.
Maybe it’s not about a wireless network, but embedding this project into a wider one aimed to reduce poverty by supporting rural female farmers. Besides, there is a clear preference towards voice communication over written, and SMS over the Internet.
SOS SMS
In distressful situations, women can send an SMS that is received by 5 institutions. Besides reporting of harassment and direct action by the authorities, these messages can be aggregated and thus infer patterns and profiles where harassment and distress are more likely to happen.
Why ICT4D (for women)?
- ICTs can provide access to resources and contribution to income, knowledge, etc.
- Indirect impact of ICT4D and access to income, knowledge, education, etc. on self-confidence and self-esteem. ICT4Ds have an impact on empowerment, in changing relationships, in agency.
- Emergence of new roles (of women).
- Changes in relationships
Why gender evaluation in ICT4D?
- Evidence of change in gender roles and relations can be used for more gender sensitive policies and programmes.
- Evaluations contribute to developing benchmarks and indicators for gender equality in ICT
- Developing capacity in gender evaluation (and gender planning) is a key contributing factor in mainstreaming gender in ICT for development
Q & A
Q: What’s the general procedure for such projects? A: There are mentors that capacitate evaluation facilitators through workshops, and then an evaluation plan is developed together with all the members of the partnership working on the project. Online spaces are created (e.g. with Ning) to support interaction and network creation.
Assumpció Guasch: It’s easier to work about gender evaluation if the promoters — especially governments — of ICT4D projects already have some gender awareness. Another issue is knowing the ICT Sector and the Industry, what’s the legal framework they’re facing. And it is also important knowing what are the technological issues that are crucial in these projects.
Q: How important is the role of capacity building? How is sustainability dealt with in gender projects? A: To be able to have some impact, capacity has to be built. As part of the capacity building strategy, handbooks and toolkits are built so that a certain levels of capacity and impact can be achieved quickly. Empowerment is, arguably, a measure of sustainability, as the more empowered the people the more self-replicable the model. But projects are not that easy to translate from one place to another.
Cecilia Castaño: Besides direct, action and empowerment, a gender focus has also some other derivatives: a sense of listening to “unheard” people, creating community and raising awareness about gender.
Comment: mobiles vs. Internet? People like Barry Wellman state that mobile phones help strengthening the strong ties (e.g. family), while the Internet helps broadening your network of weak ties.
Ismael Peña-López: can the Gender Evaluation Methodology be transposed to other collectives (e.g. immigrants, lower income collectives, etc.) so that to better design ICT4D projects? I guess that in gender-based projects there is a part that is strictly related to gender, but another part that deals with identifying and managing inequality and difference. Inasmuch there is a “managing the difference” issue, I wonder whether some gender-based projects could be just slightly adapted to identify and improve other projects aimed to bride other “differences”: educational, income, etc. Methodology, handbooks and toolkits, etc. could be then split in two parts: identifying, managing and evaluating the differential factor; and then focusing in the specific differential factor: gender, education, age, income, disabilities…
A: Gender is not only man vs. men but is much more complex: education, income, etc. So, it really makes sense to address the gender issue in itself. A gender approach does not mean that the project is focused towards the e-development of women, but just trying to include a new variable in the project. And there’s gender everywhere, so it maybe does not make a lot of sense thinking about “taking gender out” of the equation.
Assumpció Guasch: some projects in Extremadura (Spain) have tried to apply gender methodologies into e.g. age issues. The difference between gender and other issues is the pervasiveness of the former.
More information
- Association for Progressive Communications’ Gender Evaluation Methodology
- The Pallitathya model
- Fantsuam Foundations community Wireless internet network access project called ZittNet
- Fantsuam Foundation
- Zittnet
- SOS SMS
If you need to cite this article in a formal way (i.e. for bibliographical purposes) I dare suggest:
Peña-López, I. (2009) “Gender Evaluation for Social Change” In ICTlogy,
#68, May 2009. Barcelona: ICTlogy.
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Thank you for this summary. Taking gender issues into account when designing ICT projects is a real challenge. I also think the gender disparity in the developed world in the ICT field contributes to the gap.