fashTECH 2010: 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 of this post

2009 Software Freedom Day in Ghana

Software Freedom Day 2009

Accra, Sept. 19, GNA – The Software Freedom Day 2009 was marked in Accra on Saturday with a call on businesses to deploy open source software products in their operations to become competitive. Dr Richard Boateng, Director of Research at the International Centre for Information Technology Development Southern University in the USA, said businesses have much to gain not only in adopting software free of charge but also being able to shape and localise them to solve peculiar problems.

Established in 2004, Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of free and open-source software. It is a public education effort, not only to celebrate the virtues of free/open-source software, but also to encourage its use, to the benefit of the public. Dr Boateng said open source software is cheaper, especially, to start-up businesses. He said a major advantage of open source software was the ease with which individuals and organisations could modify them to deal with unusual problems that arise from time to time. However, he said, organisations seeking to use open source software must be selective and choose only those that best meet the demands of their operations. Dr Boateng said the best way was for organisations to go for open source software that was being used by majority of the people to enable them to get support at the time of need.