APC WNSP History

The APC Women’s Networking Support Programme emerged in 1993 as a response to several convergent needs and demands from within the women’s movement. The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women – UNWCW and the rapid development of international communications technologies were key factors which gave rise to the Programme’s beginning.

Beijing ~ Looking at the World Through Women’s Eyes

Drawing of woman at computer

How were women to redress the inequities of access to these technologies, and how could they be harnessed in such a way to facilitate women’s work as they lobbied, advocated, organized and strategized for the UNWCW process and beyond?

To address these concerns, a global initiative was developed to facilitate access and use of computer communications for women organizing around the UNWCW.

With the development of computer-based communication and information exchange, women’s organisations from around the world have been able to widen the scope and impact of their work and to strengthen their networking capacities. The Internet provides cheaper and more efficient communication and information exchange. As Daphne Plou, a woman communicator from Argentina relates:

“I can tell you that a letter to almost any other country in Latin America takes two to three weeks to get there, when a letter to Europe or the US takes only four to five days! That’s why e-mail is so important and useful to us, now that telephone lines are more available. I agree that electronic communications has a potential for changes and in our continent it is starting to change the way we communicate with each other, discuss issues, get related to one another, get information, plan lobbying, and work in solidarity with others.”

Women are linking their computer networks with indigenous and non-electronic communication systems such as newsletters, radio, and theatre, providing and creating new and challenging opportunities for information sharing.

As the amount of relevant electronic information is growing, women recognise the necessity to learn and obtain the appropriate tools to access and manage this information and to take part in the electronic exchange of information. But, as is the case for all information and communication technologies (ICT), computer networks were not developed with women’s needs in mind, nor were they intended to service women from around the world.

Women soon realised that in order to make ICT work for all women, they need to take a proactive position on important issues such as network access, user friendly interfaces, relevant content, gender sensitive training, and policy. As Anriette Esterhuysen, Director of the South African NGO computer network SANGONeT, remarks:

“Women’s access to information and technology has historically been marginal. Harnessing the power of both is a critical step in developing a genuine culture of gender equality.”

In many countries around the world, women have become active on a variety of ICT issues, ranging from securing local access, participation in national policy meetings on ICT, the development of information services, repackaging information, women’s computer networks, and gender sensitive training materials, to rendering recommendations on the design and implementation of information and communication technology. A few examples:

  • During the NGO Forum of the fourth United Nations Conference on Women (UNWCW), electronic information was repackaged into different formats such as newsletters, radio broadcasting, and faxes, translated into several languages, and disseminated world wide.
  • In several African countries – where an ICT infrastructure is still under construction – women have intervened on policy issues such as access, control, and decision-making.
  • Women from around the world took strong positions prior to and during the Global Knowledge Conference in Toronto, Canada in June 1997. They were able to get gender on the agenda of the conference and successfully lobbied online to get a dozen women included as conference speakers and experts.
  • Women around the world have been very successful in building women’s online information services such as WomensNet in the USA, SAWNET in South Asia, and the global Virtual Sisterhood network.
  • Asian women media practitioners, women activists and advocates, educators, and policy makers are involved in studying and information sharing on existing communication policies related to gender in various countries in the region and are re-examining national communication policies or self-regulation from a gender perspective.
  • The Network of East West Women facilitates global workspaces for women. They sponsor several electronic conferences and mailing lists, among them a Russian language online forum for the discussion of gender issues in the countries of the former Soviet Union and another forum for women around the world to discuss sexual politics and orientation.

As women have become more active in ICT, they have become more aware of the different impacts of ICT. With the spread of ICT came a new category of ‘have-nots’, the so-called ‘information-poor’ communities and countries. Many organisations and volunteers have responded by becoming involved in the so-called repackaging and translation of electronic information for the non-connected majority of women. For example:

  • A woman from Japan translates information she gets online and disseminates it via a Japanese newsletter.
  • A women’s resource centre in Zimbabwe makes information available in their documentation centre and to the beneficiaries of their rural libraries programme.
  • A woman from Nicaragua prints out information and shares it with women who are market vendors or who work in the community kitchens.
  • A lesbian women’s support centre in Mexico sets up a mural of interesting articles they get from an electronic conference in order to share them with women visiting the centre.

More and more women from the South – increasingly able to by-pass slow postal services or bad fax lines – were able to use the ‘real time’ property of the new technology to participate in discussions on an equal footing as their Northern counterparts. Access to information, which was previously difficult or the existence of some was unknown to them, made women better equipped to influence agendas and policies on national and global issues of importance to them.

Although many women’s organisations around the world have been successful in using and adapting ICT, still the vast majority of women experience barriers in making use of this technology. These barriers are often basic: from insufficient resources to procure the necessary hardware and software to the absence of (reliable) telephone lines and/or electricity. The lack of positive role models and support, language concerns such as the dominance of English, absence of training or culturally or gender sensitive training materials, are another group of difficulties which obstruct women’s full and effective use of the new information and communication technologies.

The APC Women’s Networking Support Programme bases its work on the premise that adoption of new information and communication technologies by women is often hindered by problems which result from gender inequities. On a global level, women have restricted opportunities for education, they have fewer resources to obtain hardware and training, and they encounter unequal access to decision-making on the design and implementation of ICT. These problems are often more pronounced for women in the South.