Rural Women in the Wired World
By Jet Hermida on Mar 11, 2008 in ICT and Small Farmers
Its TechTuesday again! and having recently celebrated the other half of the world last March 8 i thought of posting something techie with a gender twist. And here’s an inspiring article from IDRC about how African rural women farmers are benefiting from ICTs. It shows how “a variety of tools and tactics serve both rural women’s day-to-day needs and the longer-term goal of advancing the position of women within society”
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IDRC | by Keane J. Shore
In this age of instantaneous electronic communication, the term “digital divide” has become standard shorthand to describe the gap between those who have access to advanced communication technologies and those who don’t.
Often, the term is applied, in a general way, to describe how the rich have greater access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) than the poor. Other times, it refers to the disparity between people in rural and urban settings. International Women’s Day (IWD) on 8 March provides an opportunity to consider another form of digital divide – the one that separates men from women – and to look at some recent attempts to build bridges across it.
Women who live in rural areas are at a particular disadvantage in the digital world – facing multiple barriers related both to gender and location. Given their central role in the agricultural economy, for example, rural women often have too much work and too little time to become familiar with these new technologies. And with their special responsibilities for children and the elderly, women typically cannot migrate as easily as men to towns and cities where training in the new technologies is more available.
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