Women'sNet newsletter: 14 June 2012

In a world facing enormous challenges across regions - accelerating climate change, fundamentalisms, militarism, pervasive gender based violence, and rocketing macro-economic instability - the work of social justice movements has never been more important. But as these movements fight for justice, equality and positive social, political and economic transformation, how much attention is paid to the gender power relations within movements themselves? This short clip is from an interactive dialogue with leaders of organisations at the centre of economic justice movements, convened as part of the BRIDGE gender and social movements programme. The aims of the dialogue were to find out more about:

• How economic justice movements understand gender equality and women's economic rights
• How more productive alliances between women's movements and economic justice movements can be built
• What the entry points are for gender justice advocates who want to shape the work of economic justice movements

This short clip, featuring one of the speakers, Shalmali Guttal of Focus on the Global South, gives a taste of the interesting dialogue that took place.

A blog from IDS Knowledge Services' Gender Convenor Jenny Birchall discussing the event is available to read here.

Click on www.herzimbabwe.co.zw and you enter an intimate space that is alive with human stories, provocative ideas and sizzling debates about gender.

The innovative website is the brainchild of Fungai Machirori: journalist, poet, blogger and feminist. Since it exploded onto the scene just three months ago, Her Zimbabwe has attracted more than a thousand followers on Facebook alone – and not all of them are women.

Machirori was inspired to start a gender-focused website late last year, when she attended the World Youth Summit Awards in Austria.She was fired up by the “energy of teenagers”, who were using social media to bring about positive transformation in communities all over the world. She was convinced she could do the same.

Returning to her freezing London flat, she took out her laptop and started brainstorming names for the new website with her Bulawayo-based friend, Tafadzwa Dihwa.

The.Sponge project has recently launched its SMS service for disabled people  in South Africa, with the aims of empowering disabled people by offering them crucial information on services. The team working from Port-Elizabeth and serving all provinces of South Africa, receives sms and queries and tries to respond in 12 hours or less refering them to local NGOs or governement services.

Disabled people, especially those living in rural parts of South Africa, often find it difficult to get information about the rehabilitation services that are available to them from government departments and NGOs in their area. This initiative was created for this purpose.

The service can offer advice on disability grants, rehab therapy, obtaining a wheelchair, care giving, mobility trainings, blind skill-typing, sign language tuition, sign language interpreters, special schools for CP children, jobs, mental health support groups, etc.

Download the report here.

Personal and social communication have changed substantially with the use of ICTs, social networks and text messages. ICTs create new scenarios, new ways for people to live and these reflect real-life problems. Issues of security, privacy, and surveillance are now part of the debate around ICT development. Women should assert their rights here too, with determination and without delay. Women may not have been an active part of ICT development when the conversation started, but the rapid pace of change online, means they need to participate now to ensure that the future of the internet is shaped taking into account women’s rights concerns.

Women know that their core aim should be to support democracy in the political, social and economic fields and, of course, in the field of communications, including the internet. Taking action around internet policies today means dealing with other issues and the rights associated with them that also affect people who are not connected. For example, if surveillance and internet censorship violate human rights in the virtual world, these rights are at risk in the real world too.

In this policy advocacy toolkit, several relevant issues area addressed regarding women’s participation in shaping the internet as a democratic space, where women’s freedom of speech is respected and valued and where they can access and develop crucial information.

After weeks of countrywide public hearings on which hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ rands were spent, the department of justice and the select committee on security and constitutional development received a rude wake-up call on the controversial Traditional Courts Bill, reports City Press. Most of the provinces either rejected the bill or asked for massive changes. In what can be described as a victory for rural women, who have waged war against the bill since it was tabled in 2008, the department of justice will have to go back to the drawing board.