A GEM for ICT Initiatives: Evaluating how ICTs work for women The Gender Evaluation Methodology (GEM) for ICT initiatives and ICT evaluation is an innovative gender analysis tool produced by APC-WNSP for practitioners who share a commitment to gender equality and women's empowerment in ICTs. Field-testing and refining GEM with about 25 projects got underway in a series of regional activities in Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe and North America in 2002. Find out who is testing in Asia-Pacific Find out who is testing in Latin America and the Caribbean GEM is now also available in Spanish and translation has just begun on a Portuguese version being tested in Brazil. GEM in Spanish GEM in English

The APC Women's Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP) believes that Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are powerful tools - tools that can help build social networks and contribute towards progressive, social change.

However, as access to these tools is not equal, social, ethnic and gender inequities exist. And these inequities are more pronounced for women in general, and particularly for women from the South.

Through their programme work areas - training, participatory research, policy and advocacy in the area of gender and information technology, information facilitation, regional programme support, the APC WNSP aims to respond to these inequities and offer opportunities to women from many regions of the world.

The APC WNSP Team

The APC Women's Programme team consists of women from more than 20 countries from North, South, East and West. They are women, groups and organisations working in the field of gender and ICTs, who also actively support women's networking.

They are specialised in areas such as training, information facilitation, technical skills and policy issues, many of whom work on a voluntary basis. They have different backgrounds: they are activists on housing or environmental issues, women and health activists, librarians, journalists, or they work at for one of the APC member networks.

They are mostly experienced network users rather than trained ICT experts. More information about the Programme members can be found on the APC WNSP Website.

Mission and Objectives

The Mission of the Women's Networking Support Programme is to promote gender equity in the design, implementation, and use of information and communication technologies - with special focus on inequities based on women's social or ethnic background - through the provision of research, training, information, and support activities in the field of ICT policy, skills-sharing in the access and use of ICTs, and women's network-building.

Goals

- to promote the consideration and incorporation of gender in ICT policy-making bodies and forums;
- to initiate and implement research activities in the field of gender and ICTs;
- to advance the body of knowledge, understanding, and skills in the field of gender and ICTs by implementing training activities;
- to facilitate access to information resources in the field of gender and ICTs.

WNSP Work Areas

The WNSP reaches its goals through implementation of activities and project emerging from our priority work areas:

• Research
• Training
• Policy and advocacy
• Information facilitation
• Regional networking support

A Brief History

The Programme emerged in 1993 as a response to several convergent needs and demands from within the women's movement. The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women (UNWCW) held in Beijing and the rapid development of international communications technologies were key factors that gave rise to the Programme's beginning.

Beijing ~ Looking at the World Through Women's Eyes

How were women to redress the inequities of access to these technologies, and how could they be harnessed in such a way to facilitate women's work as they lobbied, advocated, organized and strategized for the UNWCW process and beyond?

To address these concerns, a global initiative was developed to facilitate access and use of computer communications for women organizing around the UNWCW.

With the development of computer-based communication and information exchange, women's organisations from around the world have been able to widen the scope and impact of their work and to strengthen their networking capacities.

Women quickly realised that in order to make ICTs work for all women, they need to take a proactive position on important issues such as network access, user friendly interfaces, relevant content, gender sensitive training, and policy.

In many countries around the world, women have become active on a variety of ICT issues, ranging from securing local access, participation in national policy meetings on ICTs, the development of information services, repackaging information, women's computer networks, and gender sensitive training materials, to rendering recommendations on the design and implementation of information and communication technology. A few examples:

During the NGO Forum of the fourth United Nations Conference on Women (UNWCW), electronic information was repackaged into different formats such as newsletters, radio broadcasting, and faxes, translated into several languages, and disseminated worldwide.

In several African countries - where an ICT infrastructure is still under construction - women have intervened on policy issues such as access, control, and decision-making and a regional network of APC WNSP - APC-Women-Africa - has formed.

Women from around the world took strong positions prior to and during the Global Knowledge Conference in Toronto, Canada in June 1997. They were able to get gender on the agenda of the conference and successfully lobbied online to get a dozen women included as conference speakers and experts.

Women around the world have been very successful in building women's online information services such as Women'sNet in the USA, SAWNET in South Asia, and the global Virtual Sisterhood network.

As women have become more active in ICT, they have become more aware of the different impacts of ICTs. More and more women from the South - increasingly able to by-pass slow postal services or bad fax lines - are able to use the 'real time' property of the new technology to participate in discussions on an equal footing as their Northern counterparts. Access to information, which was previously difficult or the existence of some was unknown to them, has made women better equipped to influence agendas and policies on national and global issues of importance to them.

However, although many women's organisations around the world have been successful in using and adapting ICTs, still the vast majority of women experience barriers in making use of the technology. These barriers are often basic: from insufficient resources to procure the necessary hardware and software to the absence of (reliable) telephone lines and/or electricity. The lack of positive role models and support, language concerns such as the dominance of English, absence of training or culturally or gender sensitive training materials, are another group of difficulties which obstruct women's full and effective use of the new information and communication technologies.

The APC Women's Networking Support Programme bases its work on the premise that adoption of new information and communication technologies by women, particularly in the South, is often hindered by problems which result from gender inequities. They are working online to overcome these barriers. You can find out more about their work by going to the APC Women's Networking Support Programme Website.