Gender and the Information Society
A central pillar of CTA’s strategy is to ensure that both rural women and men benefit from agricultural information and communication resources. This goal is enshrined in the Cotonou Agreement and in CTA’s Strategic Plan and Framework for Action (2001-2005) which states that it expects “a strong presence of women, the young, and resource-poor farmers among the potential beneficiaries” of its work. A meeting held at CTA headquarters in Wageningen, the Netherlands in September 2002 was one of several initiatives designed to make information and communication for agriculture and rural development more accessible for women in African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) nations. The 5th CTA Observatory Meeting: Gender and Agriculture in the Information Society, was an important step on the path towards ensuring that information and communication technologies (ICTs) play a role in helping rural women to overcome the hurdles they encounter daily as farmers, entrepreneurs and agents of community development. This special report contains the outcomes of the meeting, whose recommendations included better access for girls and women to ICT infrastructures and training, and more care to see that content is geared towards rural women’s different needs and circumstances. But the report is not all theory. As well as discussing the challenges of providing better ICT services for women, substantial space is also devoted to successful examples of rural women being connected to communications technology. At the end of the report is a well documented section with links to organisations, corporations and academic institutions that are active in linking women, agriculture and ICTs.
Spores
