To Monitor, Evaluate, And Communicate In Kathmandu: Training On ICT For Women's Business Associations In Nepal
Panoply Digital is busy with developing a training curriculum for upcoming workshops for our partner the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) and their partner network afield. We are doing several such two-day training events in the upcoming months with the first one being Kathmandu, Nepal in a few weeks with subsequent trainings in Argentina, Kenya, Jordan, and more. These training sessions are on monitoring & evaluation (M&E), polling & surveying, communication and more using ICT. They are designed to build capacity across all these sectors but also to have participants to begin to view them as interrelated parts of a larger process. We run projects, we monitor & evaluate those projects, we collect data to support that work, and we communicate that work to our communities and beyond. Accessible, practical, and (at least in my mind) stimulating training.
We will use tools that work in high and low resource environments: VotoMobile to collect data, possibly TextIt, Signal to communicate and more. We want participants to be able to reach further than they have been able to before to give voice to often marginalized populations. Women, in particular.
So what is truly exciting are the participating organizations themselves. The training is bringing together several women’s business associations throughout the region: Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. These are organizations that perform many functions: providing entrepreneurial training for women, advocacy for policy, projects for greater inclusion of women in the workforce. From Nepal, we have the Federation of Woman Entrepreneurs’ Associations of Nepal (FWEAN) and their work with the LWF project to increase women’s access to employment, skills, and enterprise development in sectors like compost, farming, crafts, beekeeping, and more. In Sri Lanka, we have the Women’s Chamber of Industry and Commerce Sri Lanka (WCIC) and their mentoring programs to assist all women entrepreneurs to gain the knowledge required to manage and plan their finances and grow their business through regular meetings and mentoring relationships.
In Pakistan, we have the South Punjab Women chamber of Commerce and Industry (SPWCCI) and their work on to bolster capacity in women entrepreneurs in South Punjab and to provide facilitation for growth and development of trade & industry through advocacy and representation. We have the Women’s Resource Center – Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry (WRC—LCCI) organizes basic training on sales and marketing & financial management, through workshops, seminars, delegations, and exhibitions to redress the lack of women’s services and empower women through information, support and education. We have the Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry Peshawar (WCCIP) and in Bangladesh, we have the Bangladesh Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BWCCI) and their many projects on enabling poor women's benefits from enhanced access to energy in Hatiya Island, to rural women entrepreneurs skill development training, to projects on stress reduction for women’s entrepreneurs.
In India, the Association of Women Entrepreneurs of Karnataka (AWAKE) is incredibly active with projects on promoting computer literacy among 1000 micro-entrepreneurs and youth, to developing maize-based value-added health foods for nutritional supplementation, involving SHG women and farmers as stake-holders right form production, processing and marketing, to the Rural Industrial Programs (RIP) in Koppal and Gulbarga districts through awareness, EDP and skill training for women with the aim of creating opportunities for establishment of small scale industries in those areas. To round out the participants, we have the Association of Lady Entrepreneurs of India (ALEAP) to their diverse work in entrepreneurial training, to credit guarantee associations and much much more.
If you can’t get excited about the possibility of contributing to the capacity of these organizations to serve their communities, to include more and more women in business, even in the smallest way, you are in the wrong business. This is the type of development work where we at Panoply Digital see some of the greatest impact. These organizations and their work are precisely the kind of organizations that drew Panoply Digital together in the first instance. We are just thrilled to be a part of it.
Source: https://wpodrozydo.com/
“There’s still a view that technology will solve everything. But there’s a growing understanding that technology also comes with challenges with real challenges and ethical quandaries.”
Quote from an informant for the Principles for Digital Development report
This quick content analysis of the report is highly probelmatic because as practitioners and academics alike surely have seen, taking care to "do no harm" in digital development practice is never straightforward, nor is a simple box-ticking exercise sufficient in terms of reflecting on whether ethical digital development practice has been exhibited. The fact that ethics isn't made an important digital development principle in itself indicates that much work remains to be done here. There are myriad and complex considerations to be made relating to the context of implementation as well as to the contexts where digital development projects and programs are dreamed up. Moreover, how and where the funding for these projects and programs are sourced can present ethical dilemmas: Where private sector funding is being used, are these funds being directed to the good of the people or to further enhance corporate agendas? At the same time, we might even ask if in the process of enacting digital deveopment, given practitioners' and academics' motivations for continued/stable salaries and/or (further) funding to do other digital development work, is there is a good framework in place which ensures that this group of actors does not unintentionally inflict its own harm through acts of self-preservation that might benefit them but not necessarily the stakeholders they are supposed to be serving?
What if there was a system whereby digital development practitioners and academics were able to peer-review each other's work, with ethics analyses prioritized? Sounds onerous, to be sure, but could be worth it if it means we work to mitigate or eliminate the ethical issues that might arise in digital development, particularly when working with vulnerable populations.
I really hope that these ethical questions and more are addressed during this #ICTDEthics workshop since the Principles for Digital Development raised expectations in this area with its title but in the end failed to deliver. I look forward to continuing my own contributions in this space, starting with a recent article I published in Girlhood Studies about ethical considerations to be made when doing digital research with girls, particularly research that involves surveillance. And Drs Kleine and Dearden are compiling their own list of ICT4D ethics resources, which will be shared at this workshop and soon in other conference forums.
What about our readers? How do you apply ethical practice in your ICT4D work? Please sound off below!
