Assessment of the Rural Communications Development Fund from a Gender Perspective

In 2006, the Uganda Women Caucus on ICTs (UWCI) together with WOUGNET as its secretariat conducted an assessment of the Rural Communications Development Fund (RCDF) from a gender perspective. The RCDF is Uganda’s approach to implementing a Universal Access Fund (UAF). The UAF is a rapidly becoming promoted mechanism to motivate and mobilise the private sector to invest in information and communication technologies (ICT) within rural areas on the country level. In Uganda, the RCDF is a means of intervention to ensure that basic communications services of acceptable quality are accessible at affordable prices and at reasonable distances to all people.
The focus in assessing the RCDF from a gender perspective was to look at the project selection criteria, to examine the benefits of the supported projects to both men and women, to assess the contribution of the supported projects in reducing gender gaps, and finally to make recommendations as well as suggest ways for gender inclusion based on the findings.