E-Knowledge for Women in Southern Africa (EKOWISA)

EKOWISA was created to "promote the development of a gender sensitive knowledge society through the effective use of appropriate ICTs at local, national, regional, and international levels". EKOWISA aims to achieve this through the following projects and programmes:

• Community ICT Project - This project catalyses the creation and exchange of local content by building the community's capacity to utilise ICTs in generating, storing, and disseminating locally relevant information and knowledge in local languages. Participating communities are at one high-density, low-income urban site in Highfields, and two rural sites - Mhondoro and Mutoko. 80% of the community participants are women at each site.
• The E-nable Project - The project strategy has 5 complementary elements that are designed to encourage an inclusive policymaking process as well as gather feedback from urban and rural community groups. The project includes the establishment of an ICT consultative forum of civil society organisations that engages in ICT policy formulation processes. The project also carries out research and produces information primers used as part of the resource material in raising awareness amongst civil society actors about various ICT policy and practice issues. The project includes activities that engage and encourage community groups to create and disseminate local content using several relevant ICT tools.
• Southern African Database for Women Entrepreneurs (SADWE) - This regional platform for participating women entrepreneurs and women's organisations involved in entrepreneurship development focuses on the strategic and effective use of ICTs for economic empowerment. EKOWISA developed and published a database of local, national, and regional women entrepreneurs from Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa who are benefiting from using ICTs for their enterprises. The project held workshops for women entrepreneurs and created linkages with women economists and other critical stakeholders involved in fair and international trade.
• Southern African Network for Women Economists (SANWE) - This project encourages the engagement of women economist-oriented academics, media makers, and entrepreneurs to work together to research, publish, and apply policies that have been analysed through a gender lens.
• Women's ICT Training Centre - The women's ICT training centre is inspired by current non-use or minimal use of ICTs by women due to gender-based disadvantages such as levels of literacy and education, lack of productive resources, lack of time due to the multiplicity of women's roles in society, and cultural assertions that ICT is a male domain. The centre's purpose is to provide gender-sensitive training in applied ICT literacy. The training facility is an informal service to enable women to use ICTs effectively and efficiently in their occupations and everyday life without converting them into information technology (IT) experts.

As part of its efforts to create and share knowledge, EKOWISA maintains a Knowledge Bank on their website which houses information including research, facts sheets, reports, and newsletters.

EKOWISA has also produced ten digital stories (accessible on their website) with community representatives from PADARE Men's Forum on Gender, Disabled Women's Association, and EKOWISA Community ICT Project participants. Digital Stories are stories produced, stored, and disseminated using digital media. The objective of digital storytelling is to highlight issues which impact on people's behaviour, attitudes, and thinking concerning gender-based violence, HIV/AIDS, disability, and the use of ICTs in human development.

ICTs, Women, Gender