APC-Africa-Women

The programme works in partnership with women's organisations and with women in Africa focusing on women's empowerment through:

• providing information to women about gender and ICTs and access to tools and resources that facilitate women's ease of access to key information;
• providing regional support to women's organisations through developing their ability to network by using ICTs strategically;
• lobbying and advocating around gender and ICT policy at a regional and global level including media-related global meetings and via partnerships with civil society organisations;
• delivering ICT training to African women's organisations, networks and initiatives;
• conducting research in the area of gender and ICTs;
• participating in regional and global events and with our global partner APC Women's Networking Support Programme providing information dissemination services, running Internet cafes and providing ICT training.

The organisation has a specific focus on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), gender and ICT policy, research capacity development and Gender Evaluation Methodology. Other areas include outreach and networking, information gathering and dissemination, membership consolidation and engagement, and training and capacity development via bi-annual Women's Electronic Network Training (WENT Africa) workshops.

Technology, Gender, Women.

APC-Africa-Women aims to promote gender equity in the design, implementation, and use of ICTs. They focus particularly on inequities based on women's social or ethnic background by providing research, training, information, and support activities in the field of ICT policy, skills-sharing in the access to and use of ICT, and women's network-building.

The organisation is working on a two year research and capacity development project in partnership with IDRC called GRACE - Gender Research into ICTs for Empowerment. The project aims to explore the ways in which women in Africa use ICTs to empower themselves, the external, structural barriers as well as the internal factors which prevent them from using ICTs to their advantage, and the strategies they employ to overcome these impediments. The project comprises 15 sub-projects, reflecting 14 research sites in 12 countries.

It has a Gender Evaluation Methodology tool (GEM), a guide for conducting gender evaluations of initiatives that use ICTs for social change. The APC-WNSP offers the GEM Tool as part of its work in Gender and ICT learning and advocacy.

It also aims to:

• promote the consideration and incorporation of gender in ICT policy-making bodies and forums;
• initiate and implement research activities in the field of gender and ICT;
• advance the body of knowledge, understanding, and skills in the field of gender and ICT by implementing training activities;
• facilitate access to information resources in the field of gender and ICT;
• create and sustain a forum in which African women and women's organisations can discuss issues of common concern and develop common actions towards the other goals.