A roundtable discussion on Women's Human Rights in the Information Society was organised by the Committee of NGOs (CONGO) and the Commission on the Status of Women on 08 December 2003. The forum sought to clarify women's rights issues, interrogate the concept of empowerment, and share best practices around women's use of ICT as a side event in the ongoing World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva.

One of the sessions in the Forum focused on ICTs for women's empowerment, with presentations from Roxana Dunnette, Senior Executive Advisor at Worldspace, a private firm that manufactures satellites and provides telecommunications services worldwide; and Susanna George, Executive Director of Isis International-Manila, a feminist information and documentation centre advocating for Southern feminist positions at the WSIS.

Dunnette discussed how her company had created a van serving as a mobile Internet access point and radio broadcasting facility that travelled throughout four African countries: Mali, Senegal, Ghana, and Mauritania. The vans connected to the Internet via satellite uplink, thus providing fast access to people whose villages were visited. At the same time, the mobile FM radio facility allowed the communities to broadcast their own content and programming. They also set up mobile and fixed telekiosks for screening video content.

Dunnette cited the importance of involving women in the production, management and content creation, and reported that the WorldSpace caravans were staffed by women and also invited women from the communities to get on air and online.

While the WSIS and the parallel event ICT for Development Platform was replete with many such celebratory stories, there was still space for deeper analysis of the so-called "information society." George presented a critical view of the dominant concepts around women and ICTs. She said that women's empowerment in terms of ICTs should be questioned within a feminist framework. Empowerment has been on the agenda of feminists, but the way that empowerment has been taken up by developmental organisations has been undermined by the efforts to "mainstream gender" which has actually merely served to maintain the status quo.

George identified points emerging in the current discourse on gender, ICTs and development: One, that feminist activism and gender advocacy have become disparate frameworks. Gender advocacy now operates outside the feminist movement, deriving impetus from the theoretical standpoint of academia and not the direct experience of organising at the grassroots. The second point questions how ICTs have been equated with empowerment, raising expectations for development as if they had an immediate transformative capacity. The third point was around the idea that the issue of gender and ICT all boils down to access or the lack of it. This has become the "lowest common denominator" among development agencies, activists, telecommunications activists and NGO activists. Thus, this multi-stakeholder approach adopted in the WSIS was inherently flawed for accepting a model of development for women that does not address issues more relevant to women's lives.

Report by Aileen Familara in Geneva, Switzerland