WNSP and ICT Training

The Feminist Tech Exchange

Are you passionate about building capacity of women in technology? Do you think that there are important connections between the human rights of women, women's empowerment and ICT (information and communications technologies)? Does being feminist change the way we practice technology?

What is the FTX?

Feminist Tech eXchanges (FTX) train women’s rights advocates in essential internet, audio and other technical skills to enable them to use technology to more effectively document abuses, build knowledge, disseminate information, mobilise support and amplify pressures for change.

Through hands-on learning, sharing of experiences and strategies, organised discussion sessions and spaces for face-to-face and online reflections and conversations, FTX creates dynamic spaces to explore and deepen feminist practices and politics of technology.

Trainings vary based on participants' needs, examining essential internet skills, audio, video, mobile innovation, secure online communication or social media. Crucially, the FTX roots the exploring of new skills in a feminist practice of technology, looking at the politics and impact of technology on women’s lives. FTX is all about women training women, sharing experiences and learning together.

The first-ever FTX trained over 100 women’s rights advocates who were also attending the AWID Forum in South Africa in November 2008. It generated a demand for regional FTXs with the first starting in Latin America in March 2009, after the Latin American Feminist Gathering. This was followed by country-level Exchanges in South Africa, Uganda, Argentina and the Congo, in conjunction with the APC WNSP project to end violence against women and girls using ICTs. In 2010, over a dozen country-level FTX are planned.

APC WNSP and ICT Training

A large majority of APC WNSP, as ICT practitioners, are trainers in their local contexts. If not trainers, frequently they are the women in their organisations who get asked technical and support questions and make any piece of paper or computer a learning opportunity. Sharing skills has been an intrinsic part of the APC WNSP since its inception as a peer support network in 1993. Individually or as part of their organisations, APC WNSP members train in use of content management systems, word processing, digital storytelling, F/LOSS tools, tech planning or offer virtual seminars on gender and ICTs. The list is quite extensive.

APC WNSP believes in working with ICT tools as they are relevant to women's realities, issues and specific contexts. We believe that the creative and appropriate use of technology has the potential to maximise women's voices towards achieving women's empowerment and gender equality.

The APC WNSP also takes advantage of events and regional proximity to bring together a broad mix of women and men for training. Examples include WENT, Women's Electronic Networking Training, a process and methodology initiatied by trainers in the Asia Pacific region in the 1990's and continued annually in Africa by APC Africa Women, each year with a different technology and issue focus, such as free and open source software management and digital storytelling.