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This regional platform for participating women
entrepreneurs and women’s organizations involved in entrepreneurship
development focused 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, South Africa benefiting from using ICTs for their
enterprises. This database is accessible
to women entrepreneur traders in the diasporas: UK Canada, USA,
Asia and Middle Eastern countries. The project held workshops for
women entrepreneurs and created linkages with women economists,
and other critical stakeholders involved in fair and international
trade.
So far women entrepreneurs have shown their willingness
to share experiences and experiment more with ICTs. Most of the
women now use e-mail for communication. The only limiting factor
is that they do not have time to visit internet cafes and most cannot
afford home computers.
Several Zambia and Zimbabwean women entrepreneurs
are featured on the EKOWISA website. One major success of these
business profiles is the work of women in construction in particular
Manyame Building Contractors which has since won a tender to construct
a house using ITDG building blocks at the Whitecliff site under
the Operation Garikai which followed soon after the clean-up operation
of May-July. This female owned company expects to receive more construction
tender offers. Figure 5 shows members of the Manyame Building Contractors
at work.
Lessons
Learnt and Intended Follow up
1. Policy makers think that because there
is a national gender policy, there is no need to focus on gender
issues when enacting technology policies.
2. There is need to elbow into the closed
‘boys networks’ to ensure that gender issues are addressed.
Most policy makers who are men use intimidating tactics for women
advocating in areas regarded as male-domains. For example one policy
maker commented; ‘do you want us to design a computer for
use by women only?’
3. It is important to create a large pool
of gender experts who can articulate ICT issues. EKOWISA will ork
closely with Women Coalition, Gender Forum and other women’s
organizations in highlighting gender and ICT issues. In any case,
most women’s organizations do not use ICTs effectively as
evidenced by the low participation of Zimbabwean gender experts
in international discussion fora.
4. Employing ICTs in making inputs into
policymaking positions is very effective; the project found out
that online submissions published are very effective; due to the
international presence of these comments, policy makers tend to
take all sound comments very seriously. This opportunity has never
existed before and women organizations should use this approach
more often. It works!
5. Publicizing on-going work on the World
Wide Web can have positive impact on profiling an organization.
Establishing on-line discussion groups where anybody can follow
the progress of your interventions is very effective in securing
and establishing networks and partnerships.
Outputs
SADWE has produced the following outputs:
• 5 fact sheets
• 2 workshops
• 2 workshop reports
• 7 presentations at workshops
• 2 newsletters
Outcomes
The following are the outcomes of the SADWE project:
• Increased awareness on gender and economic issues among
women entrepreneurs
• Increased interest in ICTs and their use in business enterprises
by women entrepreneurs
• Significant number of women entrepreneurs now visible on
the Internet via the profile web pages.
• Interaction and knowledge exchange between women entrepreneurs
and government ministries and departments, financial institutions,
women economists and experts in entrepreneurship issues.
Read more on SADWE:
• Fact Sheets
• Newsletters
• Workshop Reports
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