South Africa

The Gender Equity Unit at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), is the South African partner for the Women-gov project. The Gender Equity Unit focusses on transformative work for realising gender justice and protecting sexual rights. The South African Project will involve a core group of young women student volunteers working together with a group of young women from NGOs in the Western Cape. The aim is to set up an 'each one - teach one' system, in which student volunteers and young women from different NGOs work together in pursuing strategies for ensuring that women’s voices are heard in local governance processes.

Young women from the following urban and peri-urban areas will be involved: Mitchell’s Plain; Lost City; Khayelitsha; and Lotus River. Young women from these areas do not always have the opportunities to pursue activist agendas that they themselves direct. Their involvement in the project will ensure that they play a more central role in ICT-driven activism, and enable them to acquire the resources to infuse their ICT skills, activist experiences and knowledge of community activism into their own organisations.