The
21st century will usher in rapid and unprecedented
transformation in information technology that will
offer women a range of new opportunities to shape
the world in which we live. But these
opportunities will enhance our lives only if we
are prepared to take advantage of them.
We are now in the midst of a communications
revolution that is changing the nature of power.
Modern communication has drastically reduced the
size of the globe by practically overcoming the
barriers of distance and time. Information
technology has made communicating globally as easy
as conversing locally, forcing governments and
companies to reorient themselves further to the
requirements of global competition. Nation states
are being squeezed between the demands of global
competition and the social needs of local
populations. Globalization has already widened the
gap separating the haves and have-nots everywhere.
Unless we harness the evolving technology, the
future, potentially bright, will descend darkly,
without our knowledge, input, or permission. What
we must do is harness technology's powers for our
own uses.
A fundamental characteristic of the new
information technology is that it can be deployed
relatively inexpensively to all parts of the
world, and it can be used to support national and
global policies aimed at helping disadvantaged
individuals and communities participate in the
decisions that can change their lives. The new
information technology can help women gain the
knowledge, leadership, and consensus we need to
attain equality and social justice. To use modern
information technology for improving women's
condition we need the sort of leadership that
creates and uses power to realize not only
sustained but also equitable development. Those
whom the existing social structures have
marginalized must be empowered to participate
The 20th century brought phenomenal advances in
science and technology. Consequently, the century
we have just entered has the potential to bring
extraordinary improvements in human life.
Scientific advancement has brought us the
capability to eradicate many life-threatening
diseases, to prolong life, to change the nature of
work, and to provide for a decent living for
everyone. We are now capable of accumulating,
creating, and transmitting knowledge and
information across the globe at high speed and
relatively very little cost. We are able to
leapfrog the foundational problems that in the
past derailed social and economic development by
hindering communication and timely interaction.
[The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, for example,
provides a cellular phone to a village woman,
helping her to establish a viable small business
for herself and at the same time connect her
community to the region and to the world. Sakeena
Yacoobi's organization, Creating Hope
International brings text books, curricula, and
priceless information to a group of adolescent
girls in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan
through a single computer. Connections that seemed
impossible because of infrastructure impediments
are now made possible through information
technology. But this technology is there not to
replace the infrastructure, but to strengthen it
and help it meet the challenges of today's world].
We are, however, faced with an information
divide--a digital divide--which arises from
unequal access to information and knowledge and
unequal ability to use it for development, gender
equality and freedom. While people in poor
countries have less access to information
technology, women everywhere have less access than
do men. The International Telecommunications Union
estimates that 96 percent of Internet host
computers reside in high-income countries. There
are more hosts in Finland than all of Latin
America and more in New York than Africa. More
than 50 percent of the people of the United States
have access to the Internet, while less than one
percent of the people of the Middle East with a
comparable population are Internet users and of
these, only six percent are women.
We need to bring access to information and
computer technologies to the poorer countries, and
within each country, to the less advantaged
segments of the population, especially women and
girls. We need to bring the potential for the use
of the Internet to all of the peoples of the
world, not only the hardware and training, but
also culture-relative, language-relevant, and
community-created material. The marginalized and
excluded peoples of the world must become not only
consumers of information created elsewhere but
have the opportunity to become creators of
knowledge that is locally relevant. One model for
this type of project is Women's Learning
Partnership's collaborative efforts with our
partner organizations, BAOBAB for Women's Human
Rights in Nigeria, Association Démocratique des
Femmes in Morocco, and Women's Affairs Technical
Committee in Palestine to produce multi-media
training material for leadership development,
using the new information technologies. Our work
involves a process of interaction and dialogue
that places the newest leadership development
strategies within the framework of local cultural
and linguistic conditions. It encourages
leadership styles that are democratic, consensus
based, and horizontal. It promotes the creation of
learning partnerships that are open, flexible, and
participatory. The project involves capacity
building for the use of technology not as an end,
but as a tool for sustainable and equitable
development. Underlying the program is the
supposition that we all will be richer if we
partake of the diversity of human experience and
wisdom across the globe. If we fail to meet the
challenge of reaching out and including all, we
will likely end up living in a world unworthy of
the best and most humane in our vision of the
future.
The social and cultural structures we have
inherited in both developed and developing
countries favor centralized power, profit, and
patriarchy. They almost always self-perpetuate
unless we make an informed and concerted effort to
change them. The challenge is to opt for change
that shifts the ownership of the tools of
information technology from the few to the many,
in the hope that while we still must cope with the
exigencies of the present, our newfound power will
bring us closer to our dream of the future.
Fortunately, we are on our way to a broad-based
consensus on the need for cooperation among
governments, the private sector, local
communities, non-governmental organizations, and
international agencies to bring information
economies to all the peoples of the world. In the
last decades of the 20th century, encouraged by
the four world conferences on women, we were able
to organize national and international NGOs in
unprecedented numbers. We are now in a position to
play our role in defining the content and
parameters of the cooperative effort needed to
come closer to the world of equity and justice we
seek. In most countries there already exists a
critical mass of active women that can mediate the
process. We must use the possibilities modern
information technology offers to produce and
promote the sort of leadership that will empower
us to do our work.
Mahnaz Afkhami is founder and president of the
Women's Learning Partnership (WLP). She has
written and lectured extensively on women's human
rights, women in leadership, and women, civil
society, and democracy. WLP is an international,
non-profit, nongovernmental organizations which
seeks to empower women through dialogue, choice
and participation to restructure their roles and
to improve their status in their families,
communities, and societies. WLP creates
culture-specific, multi-media education tools for
individuals and organizations in the Global South.
Contact Women's
Learning Partnership at wlp@learningpartnership.org
or visit www.learningpartnership.org.
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