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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.

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.

I found myself being confronted with the issue of anonymity and accountability in different ways at the AWID Forum.

At the Feminist Tech Exchange (FTX) and Connect Your Rights events that took place just before the Forum, we discussed about the different and increasingly sophisticated ways that internet technologies have been used to erode any sense of anonymity online.

From facial recognition software being used by governments to identify people who participate in street demonstrations, to the collection, aggregation and sale of our data and activities by internet platform providers that we rely on so heavily for our online engagement such as Google and Facebook - it seems like the internet is significantly shifting from a distributed space of multiplicity to a consolidated space of multinational private enterprise.

The problem with pictures

At the FTX, WITNESS.org shared their development of a software called ObscuraCam, that can enable android smart phone users to easily obscure faces of the people captured through the phone’s camera. This is quite an innovative solution to ensure that privacy and anonymity is designed into the technology, and that we do not make the assumption that everyone is okay with images of their faces being captured and shared into spaces outside of their control.