African women in the Information Society: seeing ICT through a gender lens/Femmes Africaines dans la Societe de l'Information: les tics vues a travers le genre.

• Author: Wambui, Mercy
• Position: NEWS/INFORMATION

"The gender movement in Africa needs to do a lot more to sensitise policy makers on mainstreaming ICTs in National Policy". This was the main message by Aida Opoku-Mensah to participants concluding a 5-day workshop held in Addis-Ababa on "Strengthening the capacity of national machineries through the effective use of ICTs".

She called on gender activists and institutions working on gender empowerment issues to have a more concerted strategy for prioritising ICTs in the national development agenda and said "there is a need for gender-aware approaches to policies in sectors such as e-commerce and e-government frameworks to support the needs of those in the informal sector, who are often women".

Held from 10 to 14 January 2005, the workshop had for main aim to build the institutional capacity of information managers working for National Machineries for the Empowerment of Women to support gender equality and gender mainstreaming in the development frameworks of member States as outlined in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. The UN Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) organized the workshop in collaboration with ECA's Development Information Services Division (DISD) and the African Centre for Gender and Development (ACGD).

"So far, the participants have gone through quite a bit of ICT sensitisation throughout the training process," said a Technical Consultant, Ms. Jenny Radloff, referring to previous workshops held by UNDAW for National Machineries in other Anglophone and Francophone African countries.

"The combination of technical hands-on training in mailing lists and websites and the training on gender issues in the context of ICT policy makes the training exercise more complete and will help the Machineries to strengthen their national and regional networks and participation in ICT policy formulation and implementation processes."

Ms. Roselyn Odera, Chief, Gender Analysis Section of the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), noted that the outcomes of the meeting will contribute to the ongoing preparations for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), process, whose second phase will be held in Tunis later in the year, with a view to ensuring attention to gender perspectives and a focus on gender equality in Africa's emerging Information Society. Commenting on a presentation by DISD's Scan-ICT project which aims to assess the impact of ICTs in society and in development, she said "National Machineries...