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They have developed this ability through the training and mentoring offered, and through their own practice of a qualitative research approach that required heightened self-awareness and reflexivity, in conjunction with rigorous attention to coherence in all aspects of their research methodology, methods, articulation of findings, and discussion and interpretation of those findings. It is this capacity achieved by the GRACE 1 researchers that will enable them to create knowledge bridges between the world of African women research respondents and their lived realities, and the world of policymakers.
This research capacity development is the crux of the three longer-term objectives of the initiative listed above Background : the formation of a research network, the establishment of a research base, and public policy influence. The project will work with the continuing Africa teams through action research processes which have the explicit intent of achieving change, and will introduce quantitative methodologies that are coherent with research for transformation.
This second phase will focus on the continuing researchers mastering the transformative techniques and methodologies that were initiated and explored in GRACE 1. In all research, but especially in qualitative and action research and research for change in general, the researchers are the main research instruments and transformative agents. The respondents who engage in the qualitative and action research processes will be invited to reflect on and assess their experiences with the research, to contribute to a multi-dimensional evaluation of GRACE 2.
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The findings of GRACE 1 confirm the very real need to change the elements in our societies and ourselves that create and perpetuate gender inequalities if women are to benefit from the use, development and design of ICTs and all aspects of society and enhance their own development and empowerment. It is the achievement of this depth of understanding that we aim to master with the continuing GRACE Africa researchers and evoke with new members of GRACE in MENA countries and Asia, complemented by quantitative methods that fully tool the researchers in their endeavour to contribute to sustainable development and transformation.
Adeya states that the term ICTs, which actually refers to three separate entities, namely information, communication and technologies could theoretically be separated into its three components but that this is difficult to do practically, judging from the literature Adeya: While this is problematic because the three parts should be appreciated as three separate entities, Adeya deems the synergy between them and the relevance of the whole ICTs concept more critical idem. Both these ICTs address the communication aspect.
They are also to a certain degree interdependent: the internet depends on the existence of a telephone line for its functioning. At the same time, however, the differences between these ICTs should not be glossed over. Many of the problems linked to the "new" ICTs such as internet use, like illiteracy and costly infrastructure for instance, do not apply to the older ones such as radio and telephone in the same degree.
Furthermore, because different commercial interests might be involved with each ICT, national governments often respond with different policies and approaches to each form of technology.
Regardless of the fact that various ICTs serve similar purposes, the actual use of them will entail a different reality for users in terms of access, maintenance, control and use. For most users, the categorical concept of ICT may not make any sense at all. The 14 sub-project investigations in Africa, as well as the sub-projects in Asia and MENA countries will focus on a wide spread of ICTs and involve a wide variety of different women users who face very different challenges and opportunities.
Explicating the specific nature of each ICT under investigation, the specific situation of the women engaging this ICT, and the way this relationship develops and evolves, enables us to speak to the problem of the interaction between gender and ICTs in concrete, specific and in-depth ways. There is furthermore anecdotal evidence from all over Africa that disadvantaged women use ICTs in innovative ways to empower themselves.
Hafkin: 13 and Netgains3. This would counter voices that dispute the fact that ICTs can contribute effectively to development in general and women's development in particular. Warnings in this regard, which were already flagged in the seventies and eighties, were not heeded and the general ramifications of this phenomenon were only acknowledged after they had become clearly visible on a grand scale.
By that time, most of these developments had also unfortunately become irreversible. Currently, policymakers and researchers in the ICT field find themselves in a similar situation of having to enter an arena of development which has generated already complex unintended effects and may even generate more and different ones. According to anecdotal evidence and to a more limited extent, statistical evidence, the gender digital divide is growing in the developing world in general and especially in Africa.
Policymakers and development agencies may now, just as then, have similar blind gender spots. By becoming alert to a gender dimension in ICT developments at a relatively early stage of the information revolution, we may be able to prevent greater scaled undesirable effects in the future. ICT policy is currently being made and implemented all over the continent. Unfortunately this is happening mostly in the absence of clear knowledge about the ways gender, inequality and ICTs are impacting each other.
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At the same time, because ICTs enable governments and development agencies to deliver their services more effectively and efficiently, ICTs have the potential to contribute significantly to general development and poverty eradication efforts. Summaries of the research problem context will be provided for Asia and MENA in their separate proposals, as these are developed following initial sub-project research proposal development workshops.
While the overall research area that binds all the projects together is how women in Africa, MENA countries and Asia use ICTs for empowerment, the generic research questions and focuses in each region will be defined after the initial Network initiating and proposal development workshops. The overarching rationale informing the research is that gender discrimination does not have a place in an enlightened world.
Furthermore, women are crucial to the transformation of societies. The Millennium Development Goals fortunately acknowledge both the importance of the contributions women, as people and as women, are making to the well-being of humanity, while at the same time acknowledging the fact that women are facing very specific, human made challenges, because they are women.
Through the GRACE Network, and as functions of being a network, capacity building of multidisciplinary research teams will continue to take place, there is a forum for knowledge sharing, and researchers will be personally empowered in quantitative, qualitative and action research methodologies. A research base will be formed in various institutions throughout Africa and potentially Asia and MENA countries that can contribute to the debates around gender and ICT issues.
Contribute to the knowledge of how researchers functioning in networks use ICTs in their knowledge construction processes. Contribute to the methodological debates on the quality of qualitative and action research processes and research education processes in international ICT-based networks. Reflect on what are the factors which keep this research network alive, interactive and sustainable, how the network itself has been an empowering experience for women and men researchers in Africa, and how the network developed in GRACE 1 will contribute to the future evolution of the network.
We as humans walk the earth in the form of women and men. This difference in sex has not only been associated with appreciation, wonderment, complementarities and offspring but also with devaluation, discrimination and exploitation. Personally, socially, culturally, politically and in matters of religion, women have experienced being devalued in comparison to men.
The grand narratives have failed us in our attempts to understand why the human race has needed and still needs to devalue its women so. The dynamics that underlie and maintain the processes of this devaluation of women are intertwined with mechanisms of oppression.
Women have experienced devaluation and oppression because they are women through the hands of men and women. Women and men have internalized the often culturally specific images and myths of male superiority and female inferiority. Many have accepted these myths unquestioningly and many still do. Influencing and defining the way women and men construct their perceptions, emotions and thought patterns, these images not only lay the foundation for sexist attitudes, they also serve to justify those.
While male sexism has received a fair share of attention in women and gender studies, female sexism women being sexist towards other women has entered mainstream feminist discourse only recently Chesler, P. In a study of 5 continents and 19 countries, the four nations with the highest mean sexism rate included three African countries Nigeria, Botswana, South Africa.
Steve Biko, the famous South African liberation fighter and proponent of the Black Consciousness Movement stated that the greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor would be the mind of the oppressed. ICTs are technical devices that facilitate human information and communication processes. Studying the ways ICTs are used reveals which interests are served, who is in the position to have their interests served and how these interests are served.
This may bring certain aspects of 4. Glick, P. Beyond prejudice as simple antipathy: Hostile and benevolent sexism across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70 5. The research approach used will unpack how empowerment is understood and given meaning by the research respondents and the researchers. They would be so accepting of the cultural gendered myths that they could for instance not wish to have or be what men have and are. They would not be able to question the status quo, let alone challenge it, because they would be completely identified with it. Going against the trends of unquestioned acceptance of the status quo, these women would challenge mainstream thinking and could suffer the consequences for the way they would aspire for change.
These women would challenge the status quo, not because they would fight existing images and conventions, but through becoming who they really want to be. Research based in and inspired by the Critical Emancipatory Paradigm considers and treats research respondents as actors and emancipators and not as research subjects or objects. While generally paradigms are under-determined by methods and methods under-determined by paradigms, there is a convergence of sorts between paradigm and main method with the critical emancipatory paradigm displaying the greatest paradigmatic freedom Smaling, A.
The way the research respondents are framed in the critical emancipatory paradigm seems paradoxical in the light of the fact that the social analysis, which motivated the creation of the research question and the action agenda, acknowledges the fact that the research respondents experience structural inequality, disempowerment and lack of social justice. How can one treat victims as if they have the power to change the situation they are victimized by? The commitment however to produce practical, functional knowledge, the type of knowledge that can lead to change necessitates this stance.
Approaching research respondents in their sovereignty and not in their victimization will lead to the type of reflective awareness in. This will also be the type of knowledge that could be transferred to benefit other situations than the actual research context in the form of reflections, interventions or policy recommendations. GRACE involves a 2-stage research training process: starting with in-depth qualitative training and practice in the first phase, it moves to action research in the second stage.
The second stage training, engaged with the continuing Africa GRACE teams, will enable researchers to master the transformative methodologies that are introduced in the first stage. GRACE 1 was not an action research project. The majority of research undertaken by the various site teams was qualitative and exploratory in nature. While the researchers intend to eventually facilitate adoption of the research recommendations by policy makers, actions and interventions as such were not part of the research process and were not subjected to the reflective cycle characteristic of typical action research Mash, R.
This means in the daily research reality that women are treated as actors and emancipators and not as powerless victims. It also means that the researchers have to realize that empowerment means different things for different women, that empowerment even means different things for their respondents than what it does to them.
This does not mean that researchers are not able to entertain their own analysis of what empowerment in the context of their research project means. While GRACE 2 will provide in-depth qualitative training, and introduce quantitative approaches that are coherent, to the researchers new to the project to lay a foundation of thorough questioning and analysis, the main thrust in Africa will be to build on the training that the continuing researchers have received by shifting on the one hand from interpretive approaches to approaches that are transformative and induce change in themselves and on the other hand, to approaches that facilitate sustainable and systematic policy influence.
This project aims to explore and affect the ways in which women in Africa and Asia and MENA countries use ICTs to empower themselves, the external, structural barriers as well as the internal factors which prevent or enable them to use ICTs to their advantage and the strategies they employ to overcome impediments.
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The participants will be given the freedom to formulate their research question and develop their research proposals in response to their personal research interest. This theoretical and methodological freedom will result in a collection of very specific proposals, from which the Research Director and Research Coordinator will then develop over-arching research proposals for each region that embrace the individual projects.
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This overarching proposal will include an articulation of the explicit and implicit theoretical and methodological understandings revealed in the sub-project proposals as the starting point for future methodological and theoretical discussions and selection of relevant literature.