Internet with a difference – getting women hooked up

The 51-year-old mother of four had heard her children talk about the different kinds of Internet cafés in the city centre and how this one was better than the other because of the hours it remained open, its reasonable rates and the speed of its computers.

In their conversations, her children frequently referred to a certain café in Harare’s Five Avenue area, not too far from where the family lived, which offered e-mail and internet training sessions to women who wanted to learn how to use the new communication tools. Curious to see for herself this Internet and e-mail that her children marvelled so much she went to the café and asked for the basics.

Taking the first steps

“I was surprised about how simple it was. I had always looked at computers and e-mail as a very complicated thing but it wasn’t difficult to learn”, says Taurisai. “It is just like having a conversation with someone on the phone”.

“The first step is always the most important and I am quite excited that I am catching up with technology to some extent”.

In 2020, through support from a U.S.-based Women Connect! – a special project of the Pacific Institute for Women’s Health the Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre and Network ( ZWRCN) secured funding to establish an internet café to provide e-mail and internet skills to those women who would otherwise not be able to get ‘hooked up’.

ZWRCN’s project became the very first initiative dedicated to locally training women to learn how to use the internet and email to communicate, search for the information they needed and enjoy the benefits of being part of a global on-line community.

“In the beginning women are generally afraid and not sure about how to use computers and e-mail. This is because they have for many years been at a disadvantage, unable to afford or use the technology that is now there”, says Thembile Phute, Information Officer with the ZWRCN.

Thembile, who just last December was part of a team that provided email and internet training to a group of women, says that after the training women become more confident and readily use the new technologies. “We have found that our one-day training sessions are empowering. They give women the confidence they didn’t have before to use the Internet to do their own research, to keep in touch with friends and family in other parts of the world and to quickly discover new things for themselves.”

Potential to empower

Over the years it has become quite clear that Information and Communication Technologies or ICTs are not just a luxury play-thing for the rich but have the potential to positively transform the quality of life of poor and marginalized communities.

Craftswomen in Senegal are using the Internet and email (http://www.taftaf.com) to promote and sell their ethnic crafts to a market that without information technologies they may have never been able to reach. Still in west Africa Nigeria’s Society for Women and AIDS in Africa [email protected] provides health education to women via e-mail. And on the other end of the continent a project called NairoBits (http://www.nairobits.org) in the slums of the Kenyan capital Nairobi is providing web design skills to youths.

These are just a few examples of how with innovation, seemingly prohibitive realities such as the very high cost of buying computers, installing and maintaining Internet and e-mail, which make it difficult to prioritise ICTs, can be overcome.

While Africa’s own particular set of infra-structural challenges such as high levels of illiteracy, inadequate and efficient telephone lines, unreliable electricity sources, poor road networks, among other things make the journey towards majority internet connectivity difficult, a commitment at the national level to democratising ICTs provides the inspiration to bring people on-line.

Balancing the scales

A recent study by the United Nations Development Programme UNDP ranked Zimbabwe’s uptake of ICTs fairly highly, yet the statistics for Africa also show an interesting pattern. There are approximately four million Internet users on the continent today. It is unclear how many of these are women, but more than half of all African internet users, or about 2.5 million people are in South Africa alone.

As the world commemorates International Women’s Day March 8, one thing is clear – the future belongs to networks – those who are not on-line will get left behind.

Locally, the development of official national gender segregated figures showing how men and women use the Internet and email differently can pin-point the gaps and identify how they may need to be filled. One strategy could be to provide specialist training in colleges and universities to young women to improve their numbers in areas such as computer engineering, software design, computer scientists and technicians where female representation is fairly low. This could in turn trigger the development and design of ICT models that are appropriate for the women of this nation.

“The education and training of women and girls on the use of new communication technologies and many other areas should be placed high on the agenda of development agencies”, says Jennifer Sibanda, the southern Africa representative of the UN’s information and communications technologies task force.

“Rural populations, the urban poor, the illiterate, women and other marginalised

groups are at the greatest risk of being left out of the information and knowledge revolution,” says Sibanda.

All the nations of the African continent now have e-mail and Internet connectivity and can be considered to be officially on-line. The challenge of the future is to ensure that information and communication technologies, do not remain confined to the urban pulse points but are harnessed to the benefit of even the most remote, resource and technology poor communities.

Women's needs and concerns around accessing, using and defining the nature of computer-based technologies need to inform the development of such a strategy.

This article was first published in ZWRCN's website.