Womens Illiteracy Education and Empowerment using ICT

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Womens Illiteracy Education and Empowerment
using ICT

• Leelangi Wanasundera
• Centre for Womens Research
• Sri Lanka

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Outline

• The magnitude of womens illiteracy
• Factors that prevent women from being educated
• The type of information and knowledge that women
  require that women need
• Programmes that have been implemented to extend
  educational opportunities
• Using IT for this purpose and womens access to
  such programmes
• Considering gender

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Gender Gap in Literacy

• Progress has been made in promoting female
  education and training in recent years, but
  universal access is still to be achieved.
• The gender gap is still wide
• two thirds of the 110 million children
• who do not attend school are girls
• In primary school there are 42 million
  less girls
• over two thirds of the 875 million
  illiterate adults are women

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Disparities in ICT Access

• South Asia 23 of the worlds population less
  than 1 Internet users
• USA-5 of the worlds population more than 50
  Internet users
• Men dominate the Internet
• About 80 of the web sites in English but only
  one in ten people worldwide know this language

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Disparities in ICT Access

• These disparities reflected in individual
  countries
• Gender cuts across the disadvantaged

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Obstacles to Womens Education

• Reasons are historical and though obstacles are
  eroding they still remain-
• Patriarchy
• Socio-cultural and religious practices,
  behaviour, attitudes
• Household poverty
• Relevance of education
• Inadequate recognition of these barriers
• at the policy level

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Obstacles to Womens Access to IT

• The same barriers plus
• gender stereotypes
• marginalisation in the household

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Education for Women

• For empowerment -
• For livelihoods
• Control income, resources, assets
• Claim their rights as citizens
• Recognise their subordinate position
• Develop confidence to challenge
• discriminatory practices
• sexual exploitation
• gender based violence

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Using IT

• Using IT to empower women through education,
  training and skill development brings up issues
  of womens ability to use and access to ICTs
• Programmes to extend ICT reach to citizens
• Expansion of telecom facilities, setting up
  community facilities-tele-centres, internet cafes
  etc.
• Developments in mobile phone technology

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An Example

• Private sector, market driven model
• In appropriate locations
• Lack of relevant content
• No outreach
• Lack flexibility

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Including and Reaching Women

• Recognition of gender issues
• Context
• Participatory approaches
• Ownership
• Relevance and content

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Including Women

• At the policy level
• gender to be incorporated into all
• policies, programmes and projects
• womens representation and
• participation to be made mandatory
• in all government programmes