In my first blog post in this collective project, I initiated a discussion on de-/postcolonial and participatory development processes and reflected on how this is a part of the development discourse and sector gaining more and more ground. I also reflected on its complexity; the theorisation around it is more straightforward than its actual implementation, with so many layers in need of close analysis; the power relations, social hierarchies, opportunities for participation, as well as the structures and productions of knowledge we operate within.
In this final blog post, I want to immerse myself even more within this question, with a focus on the area of ICT4D and gender; an intersecting area often assumed to support the progression of “empowering women”, democratising opportunities for participation with increased access to online spaces, information, and technology. The focus of this text is not the gendered divide or gender gap of access to technology and internet on global or local scales per se, but rather what the empowerment and participation consequently imply and the expected outcomes of greater access. I want to problematise and explore further how ICT initiatives can be a tool for women’s empowerment when these so often seem to be purely focused on access – without regard to transformative agency.
ICT, gender, and development
The research on ICT for development dates back some 30 years; since its beginning more or less focusing on the less materially advantaged in low- and middle-income countries. Similarly, the relation between gender and technology were initially explored already in the 1980-1990s, with scholars from different fields arguing that the areas are co-constructed, gender relations reproducing themselves by the use of technology in society, while technology “can be flexibly reinterpreted, re-designed, or performed in ways that move beyond stable categories and showcase women’s agency”. States Hafkin (2000): “By the mid-1990s, when ICTs became an important productive resource, gender analysts turned their attention to finding ways to ensure women’s access to ICT”. Since, the importance of ICTs for human development has been discussed at length within international development cooperation, and in 2013, the director of UN Women spoke on the importance of ICTs for achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment, namely how ICTs can improve women’s economic productivity, have the potential to improve access to education, involvement in politics, and enable women’s access health services and report on safety risks. (Hafkin, 2000; Walsham, 2017; Williams and Artzberger, 2019)
Initiatives on the nexus of ICT, gender and development are thus increasing in their presence within international development initiatives, with the hopes of ICT projects supporting social, economic, and political development in low- and middle-income countries. There is hope for ICTs to “open up windows for women to the outside world”, thus speeding up development processes, giving direct access to internet and information technologies, the rhetoric in the majority of initiatives outspokenly highlighting women’s empowerment (Asiedu, 2012). This goes in line with various of the Sustainable Development Goals explicitly focusing on ICT4D, such as target 5.b: “Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women” and target 9.c: “Significantly increase access to information and communications technology and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020”, amongst other related SDGs. For target 5.b., the single indicator is “Proportion of individuals who own a mobile telephone, by sex”; however, according to Our World in Data, there is no defined target level for this indicator. While writing this text, the latest progress report from the UN was published in April 2021 and states: “Empowering more women with mobile telephones has been shown to accelerate social and economic development. However, in the 66 countries and territories with data for the period 2017–2019, average mobile telephone ownership was 8.5 percentage points lower for women than for men” (Our World in Data SDG Tracker).
Access = empowerment?
A conclusion to draw from the evolution of gender, development and ICT initiatives is that there seems to exist an assumption that the usage of, and access to, ICT for certain groups will subsequently lead to empowerment and positive social change. As noted in SDG 5.b. “Enhance the use of enabling technology (..) to promote the empowerment of women”, the only indicator is that of increasing access to mobile phones. One might, therefore, problematise – in what concrete ways does access equal empowerment in the context of gender and ICT4D?
Before immersing ourselves in this question, it is important to define what we mean by women’s empowerment – a concept widely and often arbitrary used in international development cooperation without much definition. Beginning in the 1980s, the empowerment approach was added to the gender and development intersection overall, stressing the need for women’s access to productive resources (Hafkin, 2000). Some scholars argue that “neoliberal development agendas” often use the concept as “a tool for self-help participation in the development process”. Others argue that the focus often seems to be on economic empowerment, equalising economic strength with power (Asiedu, 2012). However, this text will use the definition by Naila Kabeer; that empowerment equals transformative agency, not only focusing on immediate inequalities but enabling “achievements that suggest a greater ability on the part of poor women to question, analyse, and act on the structures of patriarchal constraint in their lives”. Empowerment processes should thus enable capacity, agency, and choice to challenge normative gender roles and power relations in each context, including the sense of agency and self-worth. (Kabeer, 2005)
Asiedu states that the focus on access to information, technology, and internet “repeats the modernisation approach to development rhetoric which assumes that when women are given access to resources, they would automatically benefit from development”, in line with the assumption that mass global communication of Western industrial societies, science and transfer of modern technology would solve global poverty (Asiedu, 2012). Essentially, an assumption that technologies are objective, neutral, universal – global access creating equal opportunities, thereby ignoring local techniques, knowledge, and practices. Already in 2004, Anita Gurumurty, prominent scholar of the gender and ICT-intersection, stated that ICT is strategically managed by “powerful corporations and nations” with little space for ownership by many groups (Gurumurty, 2004). Indeed, power-holders manage algorithms and moderate online content favouring consumerism and specific knowledge-spread, more so today than 17 years ago. As an example, data from 2018 demonstrate that only 0.7 per cent of the world’s domain names are registered in sub-Saharan Africa (Ojanperä et al. 2017, 40 in O’Donnell and Sweetman, 2018). Analysing online content and their sources, the organisation Whose Knowledge, with the global aim of centring the knowledge of marginalised communities online, state that while 3/4 of internet users today come from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, most of the online content is created by men from Europe and North America. In addition, the organisation estimate that only 7% of world languages are captured in online published material. (Whose Knowledge)
Interestingly – why do we assume positive social change and “empowerment” automatically originating in increased access to online spaces and technology when structures online reflect the structures that already shape the world and our societies: power relations, the production of knowledge, class, race, gender? Information, technology, communication, and the internet are neither objective, universal nor neutral, as stated by these scholars and accessible data. While embracing the notion that technology mirrors our societies, we understand that “technologies are affected by intersecting spectrums of exclusion including gender, ethnicity, age, social class, geography, and disability”. Infrastructure, freedom of information, affordability, ability, are other factors that can present challenges for recipients of ICT initiatives (O’Donnell and Sweetman, 2018). With gender relations reproduced by and embedded within ICTs, these are subsequently not gender-neutral – and we cannot assume sudden empowerment solely by access.
A case study from Afghanistan by scholars Hussain and Amin explores how ICTs are used in processes to support empowerment, with the conclusion that the majority of these activities (with the exception of a few initiatives on health) do not realise the vision of empowerment in challenging patriarchal power relations; they merely enable them to meet existing needs. Using ICTs for empowerment and thus challenging current power relations (“e.g. using the internet to learn about rights to divorce or citizen’s rights, or sharing ‘private’ stories of abuse in social media spaces”) is putting them at security risks or repercussions, risking an increased regulation of online presence and actions. The scholars conclude that ICTs, more than creating an agency of access, also need to challenge traditional gendered structures and “how men prevent them exercising transformative agency at household level, controlling and policing women’s use of ICTs.” The scholars conclude that the gender, development and ICT intersection need to move beyond the focus on access, affordability, availability, and awareness and question whether certain groups can use these technologies to advance their interests when it comes to economy, health, and political initiatives both within and outside the home, thus analysing both design and content of ICT initiatives. (Hussain and Amin, 2018)
Analysing power structures to enable the transformative potential of ICTs
However, the idea of this text is not an argument to criticise the fundamental and imperative use of ICTs to support gender equality and empowerment; it is rather an aim to reflect on development practices and methods (linking to the theme of this collective blog) and problematise the assumption that access to ICT equals empowerment, as well as emphasise the need for transformative agency.
Many scholars disseminating and discussing practices of ICT initiatives for gender equality and empowerment argue that a postcolonial and bottom-up approach would better support enabling empowerment and transformative agency. With the notion of technology mirroring our societies, postcolonial approaches analysing the production of knowledge and gendered relations within ICTs are essential to disentangle issues of power and inequalities, including a deep analysis of the power players and content creators online. Integrated and holistic approaches that encourage equitable access and collective empowerment of “local ICT appropriation”, including the inclusion of marginalised communities online, are needed (Asiedu, 2012).
Adding an intersectional perspective would further nuance the issue, taking into account that not only ICTs but also their recipients are shaped by class, ethnicity, age, sexuality, interplaying with the recipients’ access and the ability for transformative agency. This is, of course, the case for development initiatives in general; “the conversion of a commodity to a capability, as well as the choice to act on the opportunity, is influenced by a number of factors”, as put by Sein (2019) adding to recently mentioned factors cultural traditions, environmental factors, and virtually all factors playing into a person’s life and immediate context. As put by Asiedu: “When gender issues are defined in terms of male/female, it is assumed that barriers to ICTs faced by women have to do largely with their gender rather than their gender intersecting with their class, ethnicity and social position” (Asiedu, 2012).
Analysing these structures, initiatives of ICTs and their limitations, online content, and the question of who designs ICT, including the greater inclusion of marginalised groups in these integrated approaches, could help us facilitate processes better supporting the enabling of transformative agency for users and the transformative potential of ICTs. This includes adding this lens to our own organisational and institutional structures as practitioners within the development sector, in our forming of ICT initiatives and their implementations in practice, with a focus on agency and ownership, more than access only, to make use of the powerful role ICTs can have for transformative agency.
Concluding my last blog post, I want to reflect shortly on this blogging experience. Writing academic texts that are to be published online is somewhat new to me, most of my earlier experiences being academic essays for my university teachers’ eyes only or more commercial texts in work settings.
I did not expect the initial hesitancy I noticed in my writing when developing texts meant to be published online. I am not used to writing from a first-person perspective, in the “I” form. However, by developing the different blog posts and discussing with my group colleagues, I became more and more comfortable with the format and started to enjoy this mixed form of writing, a style between the more informal format and academic texts. I will bring the blogging experience to my future practice within the development sector, including the reflective practice on our roles as practitioners within the development sector.
My most significant learning from this experience is reading my fellow classmates’ texts, both within and outside this blog. I realise that we rarely have the opportunity to read each other’s texts and essays in university studies overall, if not in group work or group seminar settings. This was an exciting way of exploring different persons’ writing styles, topics of interest and expertise. It has been a great experience to learn more about ICT4D research, initiatives, and the sector as a whole, through this type of “new” format, hand in hand with what the area is actually about. I was impressed by the diversity of topics, expertise, and case studies from all over the world within this cohort.
Bibliography:
- O’Donnell, N & Sweetman, C (2018) Introduction: Gender, development and ICTs, Gender & Development, 26:2, 217-229, DOI: 10.1080/13552074.2018.1489952
- Williams, L & Artzberger, G (2019) Developing women as ICT users: a miniature scoping review of gender and ICTs for development, Gender, Technology and Development, 23:3, 234-256, DOI: 10.1080/09718524.2019.1679330
- Walsham, G (2017) ICT4D research: reflections on history and future agenda, Information Technology for Development, 23:1, 18-41, DOI: 10.1080/02681102.2016.1246406
- Hussain, F & Amin, S (2018) ‘I don’t care about their reactions’: agency and ICTs in women’s empowerment in Afghanistan, Gender & Development, 26:2, 249-265, DOI: 10.1080/13552074.2018.1475924
- Kabeer, N (2005) ‘Gender equality and women’s empowerment: A critical analysis of the third millennium development goal 1’, Gender & Development 13(1): 13–24, doi: 10.1080/13552070512331332273
- Our World in Data: SDG Tracker. https://sdg-tracker.org/ (Information retrieved November 6, 2021)
- Asiedu, C (2012) INFORMATION COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES FOR GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT, Information, Communication & Society, 15:8, 1186-1216, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2011.610467
- Whose Knowledge. https://whoseknowledge.org/ (Information retrieved November 7, 2021)
- Seing, M et al. (2019) A holistic perspective on the theoretical foundations for ICT4D research, Information Technology for Development, 25:1, 7-25, DOI: 10.1080/02681102.2018.1503589
- Hafkin, N. (2000). Convergence of concepts: Gender and ICTs in Africa. Gender and the information revolution in Africa, 1-15.