UGANDA: ICT Boom for Economy, A Bust for Some Women

By Rosebell Kagumire

Women at workshop on ICTs and violence against women in Namaingo: conflict over access and privacy is common in Uganda.

Credit: Susan Kinzi/IPS





KAMPALA, Nov 25, 2010 (IPS) - The rapid growth of the ICT market in Uganda has been greeted with optimism over its potential to boost the country’s development. But less attention is being paid to the increase in gender based violence due to the use of information and communications technology.

Uganda has one of the fastest-growing ICT markets in the East Africa region, with mobile phone use in particular expanding quickly. Mobile phone penetration stood at 32.8 percent with 10.7 million subscribers in 2009. According to a recent report by Pyramid Research, the numbers should double to 20.9 million in 2015. The increase in mobile subscription is expected to also increase internet access. Presently just 1 in 10 Ugandans has access to the internet.

But the rapid adoption of mobiles has also seen a rise in invasion of privacy through SMS stalking, monitoring and control of partners’ whereabouts.

Anecdotal reports are backed by a new study, which found that the majority of ICT users have had conflicts within their families.

The study, by Aramanzan Madanda from Makerere University’s Department of Gender and Women Studies, found that about 46 percent of people had problems with spouses in relation to use of mobile phones and 16 percent reported having conflicts over use of computers.

These conflicts arose over issues of freedom and control. According to the research, conducted in two districts of Iganga and Mayuge from 2007-2010, the majority of victims of violence are women.

"Women reported physical violence while most men report psychological violence," said Madanda, who also sits on the Uganda women’s caucus on ICT, hosted by Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET).

The research shows that communities are having difficulties coming to terms with the power of technology to bring about freedom for women.

"Traditionally, in Busoga (one of the study sites), a woman must seek her spouse’s consent to go anywhere, whether to visit a relative or go to the market," Madanda explained. "But now women can be directly in touch with relatives and other people without their husband’s consent and since men have lost that power to control the women some turn to violence."

Women often have to tell men who they are calling and who called them.

"And because of low literacy levels among women, they only know how to call. Most don’t know about safety features on phone or have any idea that their partners can view called numbers or read sent messages. They don’t use security codes," the report says.

In some families, conversations must be on loudspeaker so that everyone knows who called you and what you are talking about.

The intrusion of women’s privacy using ICTs has also been exacerbated by women’s economic dependence on men.

The research found that the majority of people who have mobile phones are men. Eighty-eight percent of original buyers were men, while only 44 percent of the women had bought their phones. This means about 56 percent of women who own phones got them from someone else, usually from the husband or partner.

"The freedom lies in the purchasing power," says Madanda.

Madanda's study forms part of a growing awareness and acknowledgement of the darker side of the ICT boom in Uganda. In April, Uganda enacted the Domestic Violence Act, which for the first time acknowledges the link between the use of ICTs and domestic violence.

Under the law, repeated sending of abusive messages and calls to another person is regarded as an offense that can fetch a two-year jail term.

But of concern are Ugandan cyber laws, which pay limited attention to gender in general and none at all to gender-based violence.

"Only the Electronic Signatures Bill has one direct reference to females in section 86 (4), which is in respect to a search warrant for suspected offenders," says a report by Goretti Zavuga Amuriat of WOUGNET.

The report says Uganda’s cyber laws are pre-occupied with e-government, e-commerce and data protection and the bills remain quite oblivious to the social and gender context.

"Most actors in the ICT industries are preoccupied with expansion and profit without much emphasis on the ramifications on gender based violence resulting from adoption," said Madanda.

WOUGNET has trained women and rights advocates on how to use ICTs and also how to minimize the negative effects.

Through a programme aimed at strengthening women’s strategic use of ICTs to combat violence against women and girls, activists, service providers and women rights advocates have been given practical skills to ensure privacy.

"There have been successes. The women we trained now use mobile phones to report cases on domestic violence and other violence against women, although the ICTs available to most women in the fight against VAW are still very limited," said Maureen Agena, a New Media trainer with WOUGNET.

Through campaigns like Take Back the Tech, the organisation has been successful in raising awareness of violence against women in Uganda through use of short message services (SMS). But how to address the violence that arises from use of ICTs remains to be tackled. The majority of mobile phone users are men and illiteracy is still a big challenge.

So ICTs can create jobs, reduce isolation of women but they still have a limitation as a tool for women’s empowerment. We still have attitudes towards women’s freedom. The poorest of the poor are women and they haven’t been reached with ICT in Uganda," says Madanda.

(END)

COLOMBIA: New Boost for Rural Women

COLOMBIA
By Helda Martínez

Ángela Orozco in her garden, in bad shape due to the unusually long, heavy rainy season.
Credit: Helda Martínez/ IPS

BOGOTA, Dec 15, 2010 (IPS) - "It sounds nice, but it’ll be tough to implement"; "the most important thing is to translate into reality": These statements by rural women leaders in Colombia sum up the reaction of activists to the government’s decision to revive and refinance a special fund for projects in the countryside led by women.

The scepticism has deep roots in a country where the rural population has been devastated by five decades of armed conflict, which has displaced millions of small farmers, and where rural women are marginalised and made invisible by a patriarchal system.

In addition, government projects aimed at supporting farmers have typically ended up benefiting large landowners.

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Juan Camilo Restrepo announced that the government would allocate 850,000 dollars to rural women’s initiatives in 2011, to begin redressing the neglect they have faced from the state.

The funds will be channeled through the Rural Women’s Development Fund (FOMMUR), which has been left without financing over the last four years.

The funds aimed at bolstering women’s participation in agriculture form part of a number of government initiatives, including the creation or revival of programmes, aimed at developing the rural sector in Colombia.

"The more than eight-year-old Law on Rural Women has not even been codified yet," Restrepo complained. "Public policies to benefit rural women lack institutional development and there is a lack of coordination among the different state agencies involved," he added, in an assessment in line with the complaints of associations of small women farmers.

"To make this change a reality, it is important to take into account the fact that rural women face a number of disadvantages characteristic of patriarchal societies," Yulieth Tamayo, a member of the Colectivo de Mujeres Pazíficas, a group of women activists in the western agricultural province of Valle del Cauca, told IPS.

One reflection of this "patriarchal society" is that land is registered in the names of women’s husbands, fathers or brothers.

Another hurdle that disproportionately affects women is the requirement that farmers wishing to obtain government funds or credit must present a number of documents, for which they must travel to the nearest large city, or "even to Bogota" - - which is especially difficult, if not impossible, for women with young children, Tamayo explained.

To make opportunities for farmers more equally available to women, "projects for cultural and educational changes, as well as mechanisms for oversight of how funds are handled," are needed, she argued.

"The announcement is fabulous, but they also have to offer support and advice on how to best use the funds," said Ángela Orozco, a farmer in Usme, a rural area at the southern edge of greater Bogota.

Orozco, who comes from a peasant family displaced from the northwestern province of Antioquia by the armed conflict, puts great stock in preserving the customs and traditional farming methods of her forebears, and combines her work in the countryside with her profession as a schoolteacher.

In the gardens surrounding her house, she grows uchuva fruit (Cape gooseberry), onions, fennel, marigolds, beets, lettuce, cilantro and camomile, for her family’s consumption and for sale in nearby farmers markets.

And in Ciudad Bolívar, a poor neighbourhood strung along the hills on the south side of the Colombian capital that is mainly home to people displaced from rural areas by the civil war, she promotes the cultivation of fresh produce in child care centres and preschools, where children not only learn farming skills but grow food for their own meals.

Orozco believes that peasant farmers, especially women, must be empowered to take on leadership roles, as the only way for them to leave behind their longstanding neglect by the authorities and victimisation by different armed groups.

Over the last half century, the rural population in this South American nation has been largely abandoned by the state and has suffered the effects of an armed conflict that has basically been waged in rural areas, where the state security forces fight left-wing guerrillas.

But even before the emergence of the main insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in 1964, the countryside was caught up in the violence between the conservative and liberal parties, and later in the crossfire between not only the insurgents and the army, but also far- right paramilitaries, drug cartels and traffickers of emeralds.

And one of the main objectives of the conflict has been possession of land.

The result: one of the largest and most silent rural exoduses in the recent history of the world. Since 1985, some 3.3 million people in this country of 44 million have been forced off their land and deprived of at least two million hectares.

In 1950, 70 percent of the population lived in rural areas, compared to 26 percent -- 11.7 million people -- today, according to projections based on the 2005 census.

But although women and girls represent over half of the rural population (51 percent), "their significant contribution to the national economy, and to the country’s food sovereignty in particular," is ignored, says Infogénero, a local NGO that mobilises women peasant farmers in defence of their rights and against machista and other kinds of violence.

Restrepo, who was named agriculture minister by President Juan Manuel Santos, in office since August, said women must be taken into account because of "their business sense, their sense of austerity, their ability and inclination to save, and the priority they put on the needs of their families."

He also underlined that women in general are better at paying off loans, and "have a greater sense of community," which means that protecting their economic and social rights has a valuable multiplier effect.

But on her farm, Orozco, like other farmers, remains sceptical. "Governments don’t care about peasants, which was proven by what happened with the AIS: they left the peasant farmers without funds," she said.

She was referring to the scandal over the government's Agro Ingreso Seguro (AIS –"stable farm income") programme, in which farm subsidies and soft loans for farmers ended up in the hands of wealthy landowners, under right-wing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

The ongoing investigation of the corruption scandal has found that from 2007 to 2009, government funds allocated to large landowners were 27 times greater than what went to peasant farmers, 70 percent of whom live in poverty.

The beneficiaries of the AIS programme included agribusiness producers of cut flowers, palm oil, bananas and sugar cane, and transnational corporations like Coltabaco, Philip Morris’s affiliate in Colombia, which received 16.5 billion dollars in credit.

"The AIS programme will now be at the service of small and medium-size farmers," Minister Restrepo promised. "And we are working hard to make micro-credit a tangible reality for the rural sector."

He also predicted that "the big beneficiaries of this refocusing (of government farm policies) will be young rural entrepreneurs, and women who live and work in the country’s rural areas." (IPS/LA DV IP AG BO HU WO/TRASP-SW/HM/EG/10) (END)

POLITICS: Women's Representation Key to Development

NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 16, 2010 - Research has shown that women account for more than half of the population of any country. This is reflected in the 2010 Census results, where there are slightly more women than men in Kenya.

However, this large population of women is invisible in key decision-making processes, particularly in governance - at both local and national level. Even though the trend is slowly changing in Kenya and there are now more women in the current Parliament than there have ever been, there is still a need for more women in political leadership.

Of the 222 Members of Parliament, only 22 are women - with only 16 having been elected and 6 nominated. Since 2003 when the number of women stood at 18, there has been a notable positive change in how various ministries conduct business.

The need for an engendered process cannot be over-emphasised due to the fact that men and women leaders have been known to have varying political interests, and consequently different practical strategic needs. "At the policy level, we have seen various gender responsive laws such as the Sexual Offences Act of 2006 introduced in parliament by a sitting female MP, Hon Njoki Ndung’u. There is also the Children’s Act of 2002, Employment Act of 2007, Political Parties Act of 2007.The significance of these pieces of legislation in seeking gender equality and equity is important," explains Kakuvi Njoka, a Lawyer in Tharaka-Nithi County, Eastern region of Kenya.

The Employment Act, as well as the Political Parties Act, looks into key issues of gender representation in the socio-economic and political arena. They are geared towards promoting equal participation by both men and women and to discourage practices that are gender discriminative.

"Both Acts provide a minimum threshold of the number of women, since they are the marginalised gender that should be considered in both employment and in political parties. They therefore speak to the Presidential Decree that stated that there should be at least 30 percent of women representation in all public offices," Jane Malika, a gender activist in Nairobi, explains

"With the introduction of the Women’s Fund, a micro finance kitty, more women are now able to access loans from the government but after having been taken through various levels of capacity building," explains Dan Maingi, an accountant in Kiambu County, Central Kenya.

The introduction of live coverage of Parliament has also shown a paradigm shift in the direction that debates in Parliament have taken and other policies that have resulted from these debates such as the Sessional Paper No 2 of 2006 on Gender Equality and Development, National Land Policy, National Reproductive and Health Policy, Gender Policy in Education of 2007 and the National Policy for the Abandonment of Female Genital Mutilation (2008- 2012).

Through the urging of female MPs, in 2007 the government committed itself to set aside close to 125 thousand dollars to address a fundamental problem. It had been noted that female pupils and students, particularly in rural areas where the population is more afflicted with poverty, would be absent from school for five days in a month due to a lack of sanitary towels. This translates to two months of not attending school in one academic year.

A recent study conducted by the African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC) and the Division of Reproductive Health, Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation shows that sanitary towels are not always available and girls from slums suffer the most.

This public discussion of a topic that was previously taboo due to the conservative nature of the society, has led to well-wishers making donations towards ensuring that girls do not stay out of school due to a lack of sanitary towels.

Imperative to note is also the process of Constitutional Review that recently saw Kenya promulgate a new Constitution. "In 2008, the then Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Hon Martha Karua, begun to relentlessly push for a time-table that would guide the review of the Constitution. Together with other female MPs she also ensured that the review process was gender sensitive," explains Jennifer Massis, a politician and former Parliamentary aspirant.

This can be reflected in the organisation of the Committee of Experts mandated with the task of drafting the Constitution, as well as some of the Clauses within the document which include the Affirmative Action Clause which stipulates that at least a third of either gender should be represented in various elective positions.

Although having more women in leadership positions does not necessarily translate into gender equality, women’s active participation in decision- making is essential. (END)