Back to Index

ICT opportunities for girls and women
Robert Ndlovu
April 20, 2012

May 17, 2012 marks the 147th anniversary of ITU-s coming to being. This marks the anniversary of the signature of the first International Telegraph Convention in 1865 which led to the creation of the International Telecommunication Union. This year-s anniversary is held under the theme " The Woman and the Girl in ICT".

I have seen it fit to focus on the opportunities that exist for girls and women. For starters the question of gender equality or equal opportunities to different genders has been well covered and pronounced in other social platforms. This is no new topic nor a past event and we will treat it as such. The focus of this brief discussion will hinge on the intrinsic value that ICT holds to unlock extrinsic opportunities that exist specifically for women.

The combination and use of computers, cell phones and the internet creates opportunities that the human brain was not designed to fully grasp without use of other equipment or complex mathematics. The fact that a decade ago we used to write letters and buy postage stamps at local Post Offices and today we simply send an email or an SMS should be enough of an eye opener of the capabilities that come with productive, educative and informative use of Information Communications Technology (ICT). It encompasses all means and methods that human beings can use to speed up, simplify and exchange information in one form or the other - be it voice, video or text.

The bottom line is that the use of computers makes it easy to process information on the fly. And the use of telecoms makes the transmission of that information possible. Information not shared is useless information. This is a synergy of the 2 technologies in their most basic form.

Computing power and telecommunicating power

Women have faced challenges in about any sector of the economy that I can think of. As the digital revolution progresses, there is a danger that if women don-t embrace the digital revolution, they will continue to lag at some point somewhere in future. However there are good signs that the present generation of girls are embracing the use of ICT in furthering themselves socially, economically, academically and more. Thanks to Facebook there is really an upsurge of female online users. But Facebook falls far too short of what ICT represents. In so far as chit chatting and looking for friends is concerned well, it does a great job. But our hope is that the same zeal and determination that we have seen some girls show on being connected Facebook is manifested in enrolling for computer and technology related courses as well. There are some extremely lucrative career paths outside Medicine and Actuary Science that pay well now and are in demand. Examples include Fibre Optics, Voice Over IP, Linux, Cloud Computing just to mention a few. Some of the courses now locally available. We would like to see an increase in the enrolment of girls. If they don-t acquire the necessary ICT skills via training, certification and education surely there is NO way we can expect to have women ICT experts. The culture of that certain careers are for certain sexes is a dead line of thinking. Equal opportunities to all. But it can only possible if concerted and deliberate efforts are taken by those in need of the transformation and that the policy makers most of whom are men walk this talk. This is no rocket science. If there are few qualified female ICT practitioners around, then how do we expect equal opportunities? This is a bottom to top kind of scenario where you don-t harvest anything if you didn-t grow anything.

Turning to the practical uses of ICT for the women-s empowerment and betterment, information dissemination is the best place to start. One does not need a thousand bucks to own a website. It ONLY costs $20 to register a name of your choice and a few more bucks to have someone design and load content to your page that you want to share with hundreds millions internet users. Yes anyone can be a publisher online. Any one can be visible online. As long as you have the right content that has demand, you are in business. Tonnes of websites discuss for instance breast cancer from their websites. Information is available for FREE that can help save lives by disseminating it to the girls who need to get tested before its too late. This is just one example I am citing here. Dissemination of this kind of info can be via a website, email, SMS alerts or even a Toll Free hotline where women call in a number (at no cost to them) to get information broadcast back to them. There are organizations already doing this locally in Zimbabwe.
Even if you don-t own a computer, you can always use your phone to go online and search for what you are looking for by using online libraries like Google. If you need better view of what you researching on be it a career, devotional sermons, addresses, pen pals, recipe, dress pattern design, flower business, starting a child care, prospecting for gold and so on you have it at the tip of your fingers. Take control of what you want to read or see by getting connected to the global ICT village.

ICT is a great leverage for girls and women to jump start what they have always wished for in their lives. There is NO "big dala" online. All emails are created the same. Your website can in fact attract more visitors than mine, if of course you did some serious planning as to what you want to achieve and how.

To make matters worse if you cant always attend your monthly ladies meetings in person you can do so via teleconferencing using FREE calling facility called Skype or use free chatting applications like Gtalk, MSN amongst others. Who said you always have to pay when you want to talk to someone?

26th April, 2012 is "Women in ICT" day. Every 4 years, the third week of April will mark this landmark stride in achieving gender equality ICT-wise.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP