Africa

The first "Making a Feminist Internet: Movement building in a digital age in Africa" convening, held in Johannesburg in October and brought together feminists from 18 African countries. This post gathers some of their shared ideas and conversations.

The internet is made up of many kinds of spaces knitted together - from the public to somewhat private to the many grey zones in between. Here is how queer black people find public corners for celebrating and self-care through Finstas.

In this fourth column on gender and community networks, Nic Bidwell looks closely at the processes and difficulties of research on the social and gender impact of Community Networks in rural places, and focuses on some issues encountered in the nitty-gritty of such research.

Here are tips and insights on how to use social media for activism and movement-building, on how to use internet and social media to amplify your cause. In this video Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah touches on several instances of how social media can and has been used by African feminists, and especially describing popular campaigns and hashtags on Twitter

Politicians, journalists and other women with public profiles face a substantial share of online harassment, bullying and violence. In this article, Koliwe Majama shows how in the context of the Zimbabwean elections, even as the internet brings the public closer to politicians, it opens up new avenues for discrediting them and their work, and reveals the patriarchal misogyny that underlies…

n this column on community networks and gender, the writers will explore how communities can provide and run their own internet infrastructure, the existing forms of community networks, the legal and policy environment in which they have to exist and what are the gender dynamics around these networks. Here we interview Steve Song about the policy and regulatory environment for community…

How do we measure the difference between access to the internet for men and women? It is without a doubt that such gender internet access gap indicators contribute to defining goals for international and country-level policies. But it is important for us to interrogate the role of indicators and measures in access related work and research. Nic Bidwell analyses the use of tools proposed to…

Here is a compilation of the submissions from different countries including Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Special Rapporteur for Violence Against Women on online violence against women.

Online violence and harassment mirrors the realities of persecution in the "real world" and extends the avenues for prejudice and discrimination. In Egypt, outspoken activists and Nubian people supporting the cause of Nubians to their own land and also speaking out about race and skin colour-based prejudice face virulent online attacks and are also banned by the Egyptian government.

In this report back from AfChix TechWomen Summit 2018, Kazanka Comfort talks about the inclusion of young women in science and tehcnology programs in university, discussions around the possibilities offered by community networks to own and manage infrastructure by the people. In particular Kazanka looks at how women are affected by sectarian conflict and working with ICTs and training in…