GENDERIT.ORG ARTICLES

Policies, laws and development plans on emerging ICTs rarely take into account the reality of violence against women in its creation and implementation. Similarly, policies and laws on violence against women rarely take into account the dimensions of emerging ICTs. How have developments in information and communications technologies strengthened the efforts to end violence against women? How has it enabled violence against women to happen? Help us to join the dots.
Draw the story of how violence against women and ICTs link in your spaces. The closing date for submissions is 17 May 2010.

GenderIT.org writer and a Research Officer at Canada`s International Development Research Centre, Kathleen Diga tracks the journey of the African Copyright & Access to Knowledge (ACA2K)research network to better understand the nature of African national copyright environments and their impact on equal opportunities for all citizens to access information, particularly in the realm of education. The author argues that the ultimate development goal of copyright law is to afford equal access to educational learning materials regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, disability or age. The law must be flexible in order to recognize existing or potential discrimination against vulnerable groups. For example income constraints are likely to discriminate against women more than men in efforts to access educational materials. It is a follow up to a previous GenderIT.org article, University women struggle for knowledge access in Africa.[1]

Masum Momaya from the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) undertakes an assessment of the outcomes of the last Internet Governance Forum (IGF) held in November 2009, in Egypt: "Women’s rights advocates have made policy-setting inroads into many spaces that affect women’s lives – governments, schools, religious organizations, health care systems and economies. But what about the virtual space of the internet? The recent Internet Governance Forum provided opportunities to critique, expand and transform the dialogue around issues that impact women in gendered ways, including access, privacy, security, the control of one’s information, and regulation of sexual content."