Evaluation

Can ICTs really improve women's lives and gender relations as well as promote positive social change?

GEM for ICTs and internet initiatives is an on-line guide for conducting gender evaluations of initiatives that use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for social change. GEM and specialised manuals for gender evaluation in rural ICT initiatives, localisation efforts, and with telecentres, as well as a facilitator's guide for GEM workshops are available for free download. These guides provide users with an overview of the evaluation process, explore gender and ICT issues, and outlines suggested strategies and exercises for carrying out your evaluation. GEM has helped organisations transform and deepen the impact of their ICT work to achieve social transformation. The GEM knowledge sharing site brings reports, evaluations, methodologies and practitioner's together.

APC WNSP offers a pool of skilled facilitators and consultants in Africa, Asia-Pacific, the European Union and Latin America to provide GEM services and support in multiple languages. Although everything needed to carry out the Gender Evaluation Methodology for Internet and ICTs is included in the GEM website, organisations and agencies have also opted to obtain additional support from the APC WNSP and it's GEM facilitation team to introduce gender and ICT perspectives to their work and evaluation processes.

GEM Services include:

• Training for organisation members on the use of GEM and carrying out gender evaluation of ICT projects Introductory workshops on gender and ICTs
• Introductory workshops on gender evaluation of ICTs
• On-site or on-line consultancy for on-going evaluations using GEM
• Application of the GEM framework in planning, research, and assessment of development initiatives

GEMsolutions promotional video V2 from APC on Vimeo.

We provide monitoring, evaluation and planning services to organisations to ensure that our clients' initiatives improve the lives of girls and women in their communities. The evaluation of gender dimensions is an important part of project design because achieving gender equality contributes to development effectiveness and social change. We help our clients understand the gender issues at stake in their projects and contexts – so that they are able to develop plans that can respond to different needs of women as well as men.

What we offer our clients
a. Facilitated self-evaluation and external evaluation
b. Gender-sensitive project design and planning
c. Quality assessments d. Gender Evaluation Methodology Training
e. Gender sensitisation training
f. Digital Storytelling training for evaluation

Summary

Telecentres were established to promote rural access to information so as to foster rural development. However, technologies are socially constructed and thus have different impacts on women and men. Women’s capacity to exploit the potential of the new ICTs as tools for empowerment is constrained in different ways. Some constraints are linked to factors that affect both women and men for instance technical infrastructure, connection costs, computer literacy and language skills, exacerbated in many cases by gender based determinants which particularly disadvantage women.Read more

On an improvised stage, locals act out a play about an African-Colombian girl who feels rejected because of the colour of her skin. It's part of a community gathering to highlight violence against women in a small sugar-plantation town a few miles from Cali. For eight months, men and women of all ages attended workshops on gender and technology as part of piloted trials of the government sponsored telecentres. GEM exposed not only the stereotypes and prejudice women must face, but also the strengths that lie within women who least expected it. As a result, the entire community has come together.