Editorial.

• Author: Butegwa, Christine

29 September 2005, the Pan African Women's Day, passed by quietly in the mainstream media. Yet it is a historic day when we celebrate women's contribution to liberating and sustaining Africa.

On this day, members of the Solidarity for African Women's Rights (SOAWR) coalition and the African Union Women and Gender Directorate hosted a conference in Addis Ababa on Realising the Rights of Women through the Ratification of the Protocol on African Women's Rights. The Protocol received its 15th ratification in October 2005, meaning that it will enter into force in November 2005. This speedy ratification is due to a large extent to the perseverance of the African women's movement.

However, as we celebrate the coming into force of the African Women's Protocol, we need to strategise towards its domestication and operationalisation so that women from all walks of life can truly use it as a tool for justice. As stated by Adv. Bience Gawanas, AU Commissioner for Social Affairs in her keynote address at the conference, "The task for the women's movement therefore is to constructively create ways of translating the human rights/legal discourse into practical realities and relevance to the everyday lives of people."

September also heralded the celebration of Software Freedom Day. LinuxChix-Kenya marked the day by contributing to increasing the number of girls taking up information technology as a career. Several studies have shown that not only are there few women in Information and communication technology (ICT), there are even fewer women with free open-source software (FOSS) and Linux technical skills.

This is especially evident in Africa, although the statistics are not much better elsewhere--for example, only 2% of the thousands of developers working on FOSS projects in America are women as revealed in August 2005 at the seventh annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention held in Portland, Oregon.

Keeping in the ICT field, Internet governance has been a major focus of the second phase of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS). The Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) report was released in July 2005. However, many women activists were dismayed at the lack of gender considerations in the report. FEMNET examines what is at stake for African women and Internet governance.

Christine Butegwa is Communications Officer with the African Women's Development and Communication Network (FEMNET)

EDITORIAL

Le 29 septembre 2005, Journee Panafricaine de la...