Sunday, April 16, 2006

Making ICT’s accessible to women

By Olivia Phiri
Women have for a long time been told by society that subjects of engineering, electronics; computer science and basic computer based courses are for men. This is because men have looked at women’s analytical capacity to be low and shoved them to study subjects that are deemed appropriate such as social work, psychology, midwifery or interior decorating.

Because of this most women fear and believe that all computing subjects or issues are for men without trying. Even basic email and content management systems such as blogs can be a challenge to most women.

This situation is even more propagated due to lack income to enable them to purchase or have continuous access to computers.

The new age female has been trying to attempt exploring such subjects of study. New institutions of learning as well are trying to incorporate computer lessons in their curriculum for all but these facilities are yet to spread to all schools. For the mean time, they are limited to fee paying private schools, mostly located in urban areas or capital cities of developing countries like Zambia.

There is an urgent need to break down the barriers that impinge women’s access to information communication technologies, ICT’s as otherwise classified, in this case computers.

Cost of computers, cost of software, upgrades, licensing, and maintenance all contribute to women’s lack of access. Free and open software programs such as Ubuntu and others are said to be made for humanity, unlike other software, FOSS does not need upgrades and is very interactive in terms of its open source code aspect.
This allows the user to modify programs according to personal preferences and the user may choose t use the computer using their indigenous language. This helps increase knowledge of the computer and all its functions and capabilities. This is done through localization.

Unfortunately foss is a debatable issue as an alternative although it is sharable and under a free license, it also has to be purchased first hand or re-sold at any price. The main impediment is that people who work with Foss need to very eloquent with software programming. This brings us back to the issue of making ICT’s available in all institutions of learning from primary school level.

So how should the government get the chance to provide such a service to the Zambian public? Computer Aid is an organization which provides re-furbished computers at low cost to institutions that are interested all over Africa and the world. In Zambia, Computer Aid works with Schoolnet that looks at providing schools with computers such as Matero Boys School in Lusaka and some others.
Maintenance, security and networking, these are issues that need a strategic plan before a government or an organization acquires such infrastructure as computers to be used on major scale in this case schools.

The computer must not be seen as a sophisticated machine, it is a tool like a cooking stick, which any person needs to study and gets used to. The world is becoming a global village; virtual offices are ruling the day.

Women should be included in this growing process if sustainable development is to be achieved. Everyone should be awarded an opportunity to explore the world beyond their boundaries while sitting down.

Once women are empowered with access and knowledge of computer through programming, research, web-development and hardware and software analysis for example, what an equal and informed world will have.

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