Enhancing women's participation in governance : the case of Kakamega and Makueni Districts, Kenya

The author gives an overview of the experience and ongoing lessons learned in a project on women and governance in two rural districts of Kenya. Among the background information provided is access to water and its impact on women. The project's overall objective was to build on existing infrastructure in community-based resource centres to provide the women of the communities with the ability to generate, access, and use civic information to enhance their participation in governance. Khasiani tests the hypothesis that community-based resource centres with ICTs can play a pivotal role in giving Kenyans, especially Kenyan women, information about the electoral process. The project's aims were to enhance women's interaction and generate, store, and promote the exchange of strategic information to enable women to make informed decisions and participate effectively in the electoral process in the long term.
The project has already developed information, education, and communication materials to demystify ICTs and demonstrate the potential for women to use ICTs to become more involved in governance, including both effectively participating in electoral politics and responding to their own information requirements in their daily activities. She identifies civic education and small-scale enterprise as two priority areas for intervention. Khasiani concludes by highlighting key challenges facing the project, including repackaging information to make it more relevant, addressing the cultural dimension within indigenous communication systems, diffusing fairly new technologies in the study areas, solving infrastructure problems, and meeting the impacts of the ongoing liberalization of the telecommunications environment (policy). (from authors' executive summary)