Women-gov is a feminist action-research project supported by IDRC, that aims at enhancing marginalised women's active citizenship and their engagement with local governance, across three sites in India, Brazil and South Africa. The partnering organisations are IT for Change in India, Instituto Nupef in Brazil and University of the Western Cape in South Africa.

At each of the three sites, the project hopes to develop a sustainable techno-social intervention model for enabling marginalised women's collectives to enhance their active engagement with governance structures and the collective articulation and negotiation of their interests; and build peer-to-peer networks for increasing their political participation. In short, exploringthe conditions for women's active citizenship, a precondition for effective participatory governance, through digital technologies will be the central concern of the project.

 

In 2010, IT for Change (ITfC), supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), undertook a two-year small grants programme – 'Gender and citizenship in the information society' (CITIGEN) to explore how the citizenship of marginalised women in the global South had evolved in the emergent techno-social paradigm. Its additional objectives were to examine the challenges to and opportunities for women’s citizenship as they are shaped by new ICTs in relation to specific social and institutional ecologies; to propose ways forward for practice and policy in relation to information and communication domains that place women’s citizenship at the centre, and; to build a network of researchers, scholars and policy makers on information society and gender issues in Asia.