Ewuraba - Professional African Women with Class and Style

The New Media and Gender Empowerment

The information economy, driven by the new media – Internet and web applications (like blogs) -, has birthed a space for participation, access, expression and creativity. Concerning gender development, we ask, what is the impact of the new media on the African woman? Women play a critical role in the starting and establishing small business opportunities in Africa. However, a number of newly-established ventures in developing economies fade out in the early stage of business, within 42 months [2]. There are multi-prong challenges including access to information and new skills which contribute to this failure. These challenges stifle the contribution of African women to the society.

Research studies have discussed the impact of the new media on women as including empowerment, informed decision-making, collaboration and novel approaches to sustaining livelihoods [3] [4]. However, these opportunities depends on the ‘capability to function’ – thus the ability of the African woman to go beyond access to new media and use associated functions and services which empower them in their individual ventures and contribute to sustaining their livelihoods. This capability to function starts from educating and training in the use of new media, and hence, the objective of this workshop.

Ewuraba, under the sponsorship of PearlRichards Foundation, is organizing a two-day workshop on the New Media and Gender Empowerment in Africa. The workshop has three interrelated objectives, namely:

• To educate and train participants (African women) on how to use electronic resources and applications to support and promote their creative ventures.
• To offer participants an opportunity to share, discuss and learn from individual career experiences and profiles documented on the www.ewuraba.com.

READ MORE...

This paper investigates the impact of mobile phones on the micro-trading activities of women traders in Ghana. The research develops a conceptual model analyzing the impact of mobile phones on pre-trade, during-trade and post-trade activities. A case study approach is adopted and the findings suggest that traders primarily use mobile phones to communicate and exchange information in pre-and post-trade activities. A few traders innovatively also use them to manage customer details and scheduling deliveries in during-trade activities. This innovative use of mobile phones is a function of their pre-knowledge which may have been developed through formal education and/or social networks. Improving information management through mobile phones directly or indirectly contributes to the economic empowerment of the trader. The study concludes that developing the capabilities of the poor to use basic mobile functions and services, beyond voice calls, should define the agenda of future research, polices and strategies towards the “mobiles for development” movement.  The conceptual model developed may inform future research in mobile phones and micro-trading activities.