Last December Women'sNet undertook different activities during the 16 days of activism against gender based violence notably by encouraging members of the public to donate their old cellphone to organisations working with victims of gender based violence. This initiative subscribes to global campaign called Take Back the Tech! supported by the Association for Progressive Communication's Women's Networking Support Program (APC WNSP).
Jac sm Kee of the APC WNSP underlines the successes of this year's campaign:
Take Back the Tech! started in November 2006 with a small but important idea: the increasing availability and reliance on new information technologies was transforming them into a political space, urgently in need of a feminist lens for engagement, understanding and envisioning. Women's contributions to the historical development of interneti technologies were getting lost and forgotten, the reality of violence faced by women and girls all over the world was already seeping into online spaces and was not being given the attention needed.
The gendered culture of science and technology which acts to create hierarchies and alienation in technology use needed to be confronted and dismantled. At the heart of it, we had to take control of technology to define and shape a transformative space and platform, instead of one that becomes another form of structural inequality and discrimination.
