Gender and new ICT project interventions are increasingly being implemented in many countries in the global South. These projects are often based on the notion that access and effective use of new technology will lead to women's empowerment and overall development, and have a tendency to privilege new ICTs over traditional means of information and communication (infocom). Yet these assumptions are still a subject of debates and discussions in many Gender and ICT-related conferences, meetings, and projects.

There is a growing number of literature on the potential of new ICTs for democratising governance and on redressing long-standing divides, such as North-South, urban-rural and gender imbalances. However, quantitative and qualitative data to establish the need for community-based ICT projects for women, and documentation on how these new tools or initiatives affect existing communication tools and media in the grassroots, are still lacking. Moreover, there is still a critical gap regarding information and studies on the impact of technology in relation to changing social relations, particularly on how they specifically empower grassroots women in the Asia-Pacific context.

While most intermediary groups like non-government organisations (NGOs), civil society organisations (CSOs), and people's organisations (POs) are reliant on new ICTs for their international, regional, or national advocacy and networking activities, most of them agree that it is difficult to reach women in the grassroots communities through new ICTs. Thus, despite the advent of computer, internet and the like, women's NGOs continue to use and find relevant alternative, indigenous, or traditional forms of communications (e.g, print, radio, TV, popular theatre, story telling, among others) in advancing and consolidating their work.

Thus, while Isis-Manila, Aalochana, CMDI, FemLINKPACIFIC and HELP consider new ICTs as undoubtedly important in gender and development work, they feel that it is crucial to look at how other communication tools continue to be vehicles of advancement and consolidation for grassroots women's organisations in the South. It is crucial as well to examine the convergence of new and traditional infocom initiatives and their role in strengthening the development outcomes of grassroots organisations.

Hence, this research project specifically aims to address the following information gaps:
(i) lack of data on women's actual use of the new ICT and on other tools of communications used by intermediary organisations to reach or interact with women in the grassroots; and
(ii) lack of data to support the analysis on the impact of the use of new ICTs by intermediary groups who share the same vision of empowering women in the grassroots community.

In particular, the following are the research's specific objectives:
(i) To generate updated information on the economic, socio-political and ICT environment and infrastructure in each of the five countries as these relate to the use of lCTs and other communication tools by grassroots women's movements;
(ii) To generate data on the lCT and non-ref tools and mediums of communication used by intermediary groups in reaching the grassroots women in five countries;
(iii) To determine the intermediary organisations' notions of empowerment, and relate these with how these influence their experience and effective use of information and communication tools and channels; and
(iv) To generate analyses and recommendations that will help inform further experiences in the use of new and old information and communication tools for development, and which shall encourage the use of accessible and appropriate channels of information.