ICTworks by Inveneo

Made in Africa: Africa's first handheld tablet, developed by Verone Mankou of the Republic of Congo, went on sale in Brazzaville and Pointe Noire yesterday (January 30). The "Way-C," or "light of the stars" in local dialect, sells for about US$300 and features integrated Wi-Fi and 4GB of memory. It will soon be marketed in 10 West African countries as well as France, Belgium, and India. There is some question as to whether the tablet is truly an African made project, as it is being assembled in China for the simple reason that Congo has no high tech factories. Stay tuned to ICT_Works for further discussion – the ICT4D world will soon be buzzing. In the meantime, congratulations to Africa and Mr. Mankou!

Mobile Tech in Mongolia: This is a part of the world that is often forgotten by the international development community. Yet this highly literate, sparsely populated, largely nomadic region of the world is poised for an ICT4D explosion, with considerations for improving access to higher education at the forefront. Blogger Michael Sean Gallagher explores various questions about "how to harness the knowledge potential of a literate society with good pedagogical frameworks and, if the situation demands, a pinch of ICT."

India: Increased Use of ICT for Education: From mapping to educational content delivery to data collection, from teacher recruitment to quality monitoring, the Indian state of Gujarat really knows how to effectively use ICTs for education. Read all about it

Girls in ICT Day! The UN's ITU agency has created the Girls in ICT Portal, a site for helping girls get involved in ICT studies and careers. They've even declared a "Girls in ICT Day" the fourth Tuesday of every April, when girls are invited into companies and governments agencies (globally) to meet ICT professionals and see what life is like on the job. "Girls in ICT Day" was only launched in 2011, so if you are an ICT professional please do your part and invite the girls in your life to learn about your work this April 24, 2012!

And now for some light reading… Information Technology and Educational Management in the Knowledge Society is an essential reference for both academic and professional researchers in the field of information technology and educational management. The papers presented in this volume are the result of an international call for papers addressing the challenges faced by the information technology and education management (ITEM) field in a society where knowledge management is becoming a major issue both in educational and business systems. This state-of-the-art volume presents the proceedings of the 6th International Working Conference on Information Technology in Educational Management. The price – $145 – is steep, to say the least, but for serious scholars and researchers of ICT, this is a must-read.

To get these links faster, follow me on Twitter: @SabinaBehague

The urban and digital environments are the 21^st century's fastest-growing spheres. Both offer enormous potential for girls around the world, but prejudice and poverty exclude millions of girls from taking advantages of the transformative possibilities that cities and information and communication technologies (ICTs) can offer. Exploitation and the threat of violence exist in both urban spaces and in cyberspace, especially for the most marginalized and vulnerable girls.

Download the report here

Since 2007, Plan has published annual reports on the state of the world's girls. The 2010 'Because I am a Girl report' is called Digital and Urban Frontiers: Girls in a Changing Landscape. It focuses on girls in these two rapidly expanding spaces: the urban and the digital.

The piece that I'm most interested is the segment on Girls and ICTs, since that's the main area I currently work on. (Disclosure: I contributed to the development of the chapter). To give you a taste of what's in the report, here's a summary of Chapter 4: Adolescent girls and communications technologies - opportunity or exploitation. You can download the full report here.

Chapter 4′s introduction explains that online behaviors mimic offline behaviors.  Empowerment and abuse of girls reveals itself through technology as it does in other areas of girls' lives. Through girls own voices, expert opinion and original research, the report highlights the positive and negative consequences of ICTs, in particular mobile phones and the Internet.

The authors talk about the positive ideas and new ways of thinking that ICTs open up for girls in terms of learning, networking, campaigning and personal development. They then discuss the darker side of technology - how cyberspace makes it easier for sexual predators to operate with impunity, where girls are prime targets for abuse, and where girls are sometimes perpetrators themselves.

Section Two offers girl-related statistics on the digital revolution and the digital divide and highlights the enormous variation between and within countries in terms of digital access, and the gaps between rich and poor, male and female, urban and rural.  The report cautions that excluding girls from the digital revolution will have consequences on their growth and development. For additional global ICT statistics (1998-2009) see this post at ICT4D blog. Another resource on mobiles and women is the Cherie Blair study.

Section Three describes and provides statistics around 7 important reasons that ICTs are important to adolescent girls:

1. To keep in touch with others and reduce isolation in countries where this is an issue
2. To further their education and acquire new skills
3. To take an active part in their communities and countries
4. In order to have the skills to find work
5. To build specific skills and knowledge on subjects they might otherwise not know about, such as HIV and AIDS
6. Because evidence has shown that learning to use these technologies can build self-esteem
7. In order to keep safe

Section Four goes in depth around ways that adolescent girls compete with adolescent boys for the most use of communications technologies such as mobiles and the Internet, but that often they are using them for different reasons and different purposes. Most of the available research for this chapter is from the 'North', yet the studies indicate that girls tend to use ICTs for communication and boys tend toward a focus on the technology itself. Studies on this from the 'South' are unavailable to date.

When girls are treated as real partners....

Section Five discusses the barriers that keep adolescent girls from accessing ICTs. In other words, if the importance of ICTs has been established, girls are willing and able and keen to use ICTs, then what prevents them from having equal access to ICTs? Some of the issues that the chapter discusses are those of power and control.

I can immediately call the wholesale market to inquire about prices and place direct orders. I am now recognized as a businesswoman, growing and selling sesame seeds, not just as somebody's wife or sister,' said a woman in India.

'You're a girl - a mobile can cause many problems, and so you don't need it,' said the father of a Palestinian girl.

Girls' access to technology is limited by their societies, communities and families. In patriarchal societies where men control technology, girls and women simply have less access, because ICT's confer power on the user. Even in educational settings, a study found that boys tend to hog available ICTs. Teachers have distinct expectations from boys vs. girls. Girls also don't tend to go into the field of ICTs or want to have ICT careers, since the field is typically a male field.

'Technology appears to be marketed by men for men. It's time we started switching bright and talented girls on to science and technology,' comments a British government official.

Women and girls in developing countries however are not receiving the basic education and training that they need to be ready technology adopters. They are seen as users and receivers of technology, not as innovators involved in technology design and development. Once they are computer literate, however, many young women see the computer industry as a route to independence. The report offers statistics on the numbers of young women in countries like South Africa, India, Malaysia and Brazil who are working in the ICT related industries and professions.

What stops girls from using technology?

There are seven key factors that prevent girls from taking advantage of technology:

1. Discrimination - girls are still viewed as second-class citizens in many societies.
2. Numbers - boys both outnumber girls and tend to dominate access to computers.
3. Confidence - because they don't have equal access at school, girls may be less confident than boys when it comes to going into IT jobs because they don't feel they have the same skills and knowledge as the young men competing for the jobs.
4. Language - in order to use these technologies, English is usually a requirement, and for girls with only basic literacy in their own language, this is a major barrier.
5. Time - girls' domestic roles, even at a young age, mean they have less free time than boys to explore and experiment with new technologies.
6. Money - girls are less likely than their brothers to have the financial resources to pay for, say, a mobile phone and its running costs, or access to the web in an internet café.
7. Freedom - boys are also more likely to be allowed to use internet cafés because parents are concerned about their daughters going out on their own.

Section Six digs into the dark side of cyberspace and the risks that adolescent are exposed to at a time of their lives when they are beginning to develop sexually. One in 5 women report having been sexually abused before the age of 15, according to the authors. The Internet by and large is simply a new medium for old kinds of bad behavior, however; and new technologies simply extend the possibility of abuse to new arenas. Girls who are not even using the Internet are still vulnerable, given that a photo of them can be taken and posted by someone else even if they have no computer access. Cyberbullying and cyberharrassment are other risks that girls face.

Many young people and youth organizations are active in facing these risks and protecting themselves, and various campaigns exist to help adolescent girls be more aware of how to protect themselves while using ICTs. New technology can itself also be a tool to help with counter-trafficking efforts. The chapter outlines some of the different efforts being made to protect girls online, and emphasizes the role of parents and schools in discussing on-line use and being supportive as girls begin exploring cyberspace.

There is a quite broad set of recommendations for a wide array of actors at the end of Chapter 4 that could be taken up, contextualized and fleshed out by different parties or stakeholders into specific calls to action:

Brazilian girls in a digital world. As an annex to Chapter 4 on ICTs, new research with 49 boys and 44 girls, aged 10-14 examines adolescent girls' rights and protection in Brazil within the context of ICTs. ICT use is growing exponentially in Brazil, particularly among 15-17 year olds, where between 2005 and 2008, ICT usage went from 33.7 to 62.9 percent. The study covers use pattern, links between on-line and off-line behavior, and on-line safety.

Conclusions. The report concludes by calling for greater knowledge about ICT-related sexual exploitation and violence against girls, more emphasis on prevention and stronger international standards. It also points out that girls need to be empowered to use new communications technologies safely, on their own terms, and in ways that promote their development and build their futures.

Resources

• Download the full report here: Digital and Urban Frontiers: Girls in a Changing Landscape
• Download the Girl's Cohort Study: Real Choices, Real Lives. Plan researchers follow 142 girls lives over a 9-year period.
• Download past Because I am a Girl Reports (since 2007)

This post was originally published as Because I am a Girl 2010: Girls and ICTs

"Girls in Cyberspace: Dangers and Opportunities" (PDF) from Plan USA examines both the challenges and empowering possibilities facing girls when accessing ICTs (Information Communication Technologies). In many ways, technology has facilitated girls’ ability to do what they were already doing: connecting, learning and sharing. ICTs have also increased their opportunities to do these things and to interact beyond their immediate communities.

Although adolescent girls are not a homogeneous group, and the way they choose to interact with ICTs may vary according to their location, social-economic status, capacity for mobility and personal inclination, there are some common threads emerging from Plan’s analysis.

ICTs can have an empowering effect on girls as they go through puberty: ICTs have exposed adolescent girls to new ideas and ways of thinking that open up possibilities for learning, networking, campaigning and personal development. Overall, the skills that adolescent girls can develop through and with ICTs build their resilience, allowing them to mitigate some of the challenges posed by puberty. This gradual process is shown in the following diagram:

At the same time, ICTs can also have negative consequences as they increasingly provide strangers with access to a girl’s personal space and allow for exploitative practices that can harm girls in faster and more immediate ways than ever before. On-line patterns of behaviour are a reflection of the way that society operates off-line. This paper will examine how attitudes towards empowerment and the abuse of adolescent girls reveal themselves through technology.

I was not computer literate when I started using Internet on my mobile phone, so it was quite an eye opener. Now I want to learn everything; my uncle bought a computer two months ago, and his wife has been teaching me some basics.
– Patience, a young refugee from Zimbabwe, living in South Africa16

Based on original research undertaken in Brazil by Plan for the 2010 “Because I am a Girl” report (together with the Child Protection Partnership), this paper will outline the opportunities ICTs provide adolescent girls and analyze the potential dangers and exploitative behaviours that are facilitated through them.

To conclude, we draw out the main policy recommendations for and with adolescent girls to make cyberspace safer. Greater knowledge about ICT-related sexual exploitation and violence against girls is needed, and more emphasis on prevention and stronger international standards is critical. We call on various sectors to do more to protect girls on-line and to ensure girls have the capacity and knowledge to protect themselves and each other.

Adolescent girls must be empowered to use the Internet and other communications technologies safely, on their own terms and in ways that promote their overall development and build their future possibilities.

This post is an adaptation of the Girls in Cyberspace report executive summary

As part of the Educational Technology Debate on expanding the role of women in ICT, I interviewed Kristin Peterson, co-founder and CEO of Inveneo.

I wanted to know how she was motivated to make a difference in the ICT field and how we might learn from her example to inspire girls and women in the developing world to use ICT in their chosen careers.

Interestingly enough, technology was not Kristin's first career. Watch the video to learn more:

Note that Krisitin listed the importance of parents & mentors in formulating her desire to make a difference using ICT. My favorite was her early mentor source: TV. Through this often maligned ICT, Kristin saw powerful women role modes to emulate and give her inspiration.