Worshop participantsToroDev, one of the GenARDIS grantees, organised a to brainstorm on gender, ICT policy and rural infrastructure issues, support rural small scale women involved in agriculture and agribusiness sector in Kabarole and Kyenjojo districts to access and use simple and affordable, traditional and modern ICT tools that can help them to improve on their production and marketing skills.
Agriculture and Agro-business sector is the main source of economic empowerment for the majority of the population in the Rwenzori region of western Uganda, particularly in Kabarole and Kyenjojo districts where ToroDev operates. Findings show that men have dominated agricultural production and other agribusiness activities in the community. Most of the women have supported men, especially in terms of free labor on agricultural farms in order to increase production. Unfortunately, women hardly claim ownership of revenue realized from the sale of such agricultural products.
Other community constructed gender issues contribute to this situation too; there are still strong beliefs that women do not own or need to own their own land, especially among the rural community; that all economic and financial issues at homestead and community levels should be controlled by men, etc. This means that information about better production practices, access to better markets, trainings, etc. are also dominated by men since they directly relate to agricultural and economic development. All these issues have left rural women reluctant to strategically empower themselves economically, especially through involving themselves in agricultural production and agribusiness sector aggressively.
Although a reasonable number of rural women in the community are steadily struggling to defy these negative gender beliefs that have long left them socially and economically less empowered, much support is still desired. The support identified by ToroDev that can help the grass root rural women to exploit opportunities that can empower them in the agricultural and agro-business sector is sustainable access and use of affordable, relevant local content information services for knowledge sharing for improving production and marketing skills. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have the potential to facilitate exploitation of many opportunities for rural women involved small scale agriculture and agro-business sector. It should be noted however that there is still also a challenge of expanding the ICT infrastructure in the rural community in Uganda.
This report therefore, gives a detailed account of ToroDev’s intervention strategy by holding a training workshop, in partnership with the Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) and Rwenzori Information Centre’s Network (RICNET).
