APC WNSP's advocacy is aimed at encouraging commitment to gender evaluations of ICT projects, to ensure that all forms of ICT-type initiatives and policy-making consider gender and ICT issues and in seriously addressing these. This advocacy is done through many different spaces and environments, like:
(a) through the design and conduct of the GEM workshops which are consistently in demand;
(b) the translation of the GEM manual, hence, allowing for the wider use and promotion of GEM in countries and with communities who speak different languages; and
(c) our participation in various venues and platforms—sometimes as consultant and sometimes as key presenter.

These various forms of engagement have led to four types of significant outcomes:

• GEM being adopted as an evaluation methodology. The TRICALCAR project—Community Wireless Training Project in Latin America and the Caribbean—that is being implemented by APC members in the region. The project now has a component on community, gender and ICTs in the TRICALCAR training curriculum and workshops, conducted in collaboration with APC member Nodo TAU trainers and facilitators.
• GEM being adapted or incorporated as part of the project’s (or organisation’s) existing evaluation methodology and framework. Through the second phase of the GEM project, APC WNSP is working closely with the PAN Localisation Network to build up localisation initiatives' capacities to design, implement, monitor and evaluate their work with a gender perspective.
• GEM being used for program/project design and monitoring. iREACH is a community-driven universal project in rural Cambodia covering six communes in two districts, and APC WNSP was involved through a consultancy to ensure integration of the gender perspective in the project proposal.
• Stronger ownership and interest in the promotion of GEM by the GEM practitioners community. A publication in Portuguese by Rede Mulher de Educacao, Brazil, with PARM LAC participation has been published, entitled “Women and ICTs, including tools and issues discussed in GEM”. Rede Mulher was a GEM project partner in phase one. This publication is the result of the GEM workshop held in 2006 in Sao Paulo with 40 popular educators and members of Rede Mulher’s network.

In Phase 2 of the GEM project (November 2006 to February 2010), we now have the following project partners:

Rural ICT for Development Projects

• Anupama Saxena, Head, Department of Political Science and Public Administration and in charge Director of Women's Studies and Development Centre of Guru Ghasidas University, Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, India
Anupama Saxena decided to conduct an evaluation research on the E-Gram Suraj project or the e-good governance project conducted at village level in India. A total of 64 village panchayats were selected for this research. The evaluation is aimed at examining what is the extent of rural women and men's participation in this e-good governance project, especially among the heads of the Village Self Government Units, and to also examine if the introduction of ICT through the Government of India's E-Gram Suraj project, has been effective in changing the lives of women and men in these villages.

• Development Research Network (D.Net), Bangladesh
D.Net is using GEM to assess its Computer Learning Programme which has been in implementation since 2004. The Computer Learning Programme is one of D.Net’s major programmes, which seeks to empower underprivileged youth in Bangladesh
through computer literacy. Through this programme, D.Net is operating 80 computer learning centres in collaboration with local educational institutions and community groups. The Computer Learning Programme was evaluated in 2006, and the findings showed the need to interrogate more deeply the gender dimension of the project as responses from both girl and boy students were quite different. In 2008, D.Net decided to use GEM to look more closely at the behaviour change of girl and boy students as a result of their participation in the Computer Learning Programme.

• Fantsuam Foundation, Nigeria
Fantsuam Foundation is using GEM to conduct an evaluation and the first gender analysis of Nigeria's first community wireless network (ZittNet). Women who are accessing Fantsuam's microcedit programme have been asking for information that could help them in supporting their various roles and responsibilites, and fulfill their information needs. However, after the introduction of the community wireless network, ZittNet, Fantsuam had found that women were not using this service as they first thought they would. The evaluation findings are meant to help Fantsuam increase the female uptake of the wireless services at ZittNet by 30% within 12 months.

• Gender, Agriculture and Rural Development in the Information Society (GenARDIS)
The GEM project team will work closely with the GenARDIS coordination team to build up capacities of GenARDIS seedgrantees in designing and evaluating their projects with a gender perspective.

Telecentres

• Colnodo, Colombia
Colnodo decided to apply GEM in a larger project framework of "Building awareness and sharing experiences between community telecentres and Compartel telecentres in Colombia". The project has aims that are well aligned with why GEM was first developed, specifically to increase women's participation and awareness about issues in their neighbourhood in order to generate actions and strategies through a creative use of ICTs in the telecentres. The aim is to build awareness in women about their role in domestic and community life and the power relations that they establish with men. Along this process, which will be addressed through workshops, participation and support from women leaders in the community, already aware and active, will be a key point, as well as the participation of men in the community. The idea is to move the community to a higher level of self-empowerment, to empowering women and men to identify and analyse their own problems and to decide on the most appropriate actions to solve them, in this case through ICTs. This passage from awareness to activism involves training women to analyse their problems and seek alternative solutions. This evaluation process which adopts GEM as the methodology, will be complemented by the telecentre evaluation through a methodology designed by Universidad Autónoma de Occidente, UAO, the co-sponsor of the project.

• CEPES, Peru
GEM will be used to evaluate the SIA (Sistema de Información Agraria)-Huaral telecentres which were started up by CEPES in Huaral, and which are now supported and directed by the local farmers’ organization (Junta de Usuarios de Riego or the irrigation users’ board). Different aspects of the project have been under study in the past years, some conducted by CEPES, but mostly conducted by external researchers. While most of those researches had a gender perspective, none had articulated gender issues as the main motivation of the research. Because CEPES has been observing gender outcomes and impacts from the project’s start, albeit non-systematically, there was a need to conduct an evaluation to be able to verify what exactly may be exacerbating gender inequality and how; and what exactly is encouraging and supporting women's self-empowerment, and how. CEPES in particular will explore if the communication activities of the SIA project enacted at the telecentres are or not being equally inclusive for men and women, and to further analyze how and to what extent being a telecentre operator contributes to women's empowerment, in private and public spheres. CEPES is also exploring the utility of using a participative tool as GEM and seeing up to what point such a participative approach can be productive when defining the purposes of a research with the community.

• Philippine Community e-Centre (Phil CeC), under the National Computer Center (NCC) of the Commission on Information and Communications Technology, Philippines
The NCC is piloting the application of GEM with two community e-centres in Binalonan in Pangasinan Province and Bato in Leyte Province, in the Philippines. The results of the evaluation will be used to further improve the Philippine CeC Network strategies; to document and be able to replicate the development of a gender sensitive telecenter; and to establish a standard evaluation methodology in Philippine CeCs.

• UgaBYTES, Uganda
UgaBYTES intends to carry out a gender focused evaluation in two of its supported telecentres, to inform its process using and adopting the Gender Evaluation Methodology (GEM) tools. It will also help other networks to understand the application of the tools in improving equitable access to telecentres once the results are put into use. Telecentre.org is specifically interested in gaining lessons and experiences from the process when results are put into use. This research is intended for telecentre management committees and staff to address equitable access to information. It is also to re-focus on how ICT initiatives intend to address women and the marginalized groups for leveraging ICT access and usage. The two telecentres of Buwama Community Multimedia Centres (CMC) and Kawolo telecentre were purposively selected for the evaluation process. The centres use a combination of ICT tools including a community radio, computers, a resource bank and telephones in addition to the traditional communication tools.

• Afriklinks, Mali

Gender and ICT Policy Advocacy -- Entry Points and Processes

• BytesforAll, Pakistan
• Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Chile
• Datamation India, India
• Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANET), Kenya
• One World Southeast Europe (OWPSEE), Bosnia-Herzegovina

Localisation Initiatives

• Open Institute, Cambodia

• PAN Localisation Project (PANL10n), regional secretariat is based in Pakistan
The PAN Localization project is in collaboration with the GEM II project to determine how gender and ICT issues faced by localisation initiatives can best be identified and addressed in the planning, monitoring and evaluation of localisation initiatives. The PAN Localisation project is using a gendered Outcome Mapping framework, and will be exploring what would be the most suitable complementary evaluation methods with the GEM II project team.

More on who is using GEM can be found here.