womengovern_admin's blog

These videos were produced as part of the Yalodês Action Research Project, which is being carried out in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as part of the Women-Gov initiative.

Vanessa Ludwig

From the beginning of our work with the women's collectives (sanghas) in Mysore district, we have been cognisant that our field intervention strategies must not lead to the creation of alternative power structures at the village level.

A couple of days ago, we had an internal discussion at IT for Change to reflect on our vision for the village level information centres (Namma Mahiti Kendras) we plan to set up, as part of the 'Women-gov' project. From our earlier work in this area, under which we have set up two such centres, many of us felt that 'community ownership' is at the heart of our imagination of these centres.

Young women from disadvantaged backgrounds on the Cape Flats in Western Cape, like many other countries of the South face multiple barriers in receiving and communicating information regarding public services and local governance. Traditional communication tools were not used successfully to catapult young women into the arena of participatory governance as many political spaces have closed down on them.

In the Yoruba¹ language, Yalodê is the word used to refer to women who represent and speak in the name of other women, who emerge as political leaders, agents of transformation, who are emblematic in the development of their community, in the defense of rights, in the maintenance of cultural and religious traditions, and in challenging the status quo, fighting against the stratified powers of the dominant order – male centered, euro centered,

South Africa recently held its first ICT conference. The who’s who of the country’s Internet start-ups, government officials and business were in attendance at the week-long he Indaba in Cape Town. The talk amongst the invited guests were how best to ensure millions of South Africans get access to the Internet.