Women's Equality & Digital Access: Rights To Expression WE-DARE

The project involves two interrelated approaches: a) organising networking events and other in-depth stakeholder engagements to build an active research consortium of academics and practitioners focused on combating violence against women; and b) facilitating the co-creation of problem-solving digital innovations to be implemented and studied in a further phase of the project (post-October 2020).
a) The networking events and stakeholder engagements with 10 network partners (NGOs and tech companies) will explore 4 interrelated dimensions:
- Understanding women's rights in a digital context: By means of inclusive stakeholder dialogues taking place at a Roundtable and a Public Forum, we will explore how women's rights are constructed in online spaces and collective movements in South Africa and elsewhere, in order to identify the tacit roots of discrimination and victimization, and to understand how these may be reproduced, but could also be addressed, in digital settings.
- Access: Through focus groups, we will identify the primary local barriers to access that undermines the agency of women in realising their rights and protecting themselves against violence and intimidation. We aim to understand both practical impediments like access to electricity, affordable data and instruments, as well as the more tacit cultural, social and individual factors that could undermine active participation in digital spaces.
- Participation: The potential of digital platforms to enable easier access to government services, especially around healthcare and justice, can play an important role in upholding women's rights, protecting them against violence and intimidation, and offering avenues for recourse and support. We will explore how the participation of women in relevant policy platforms could be strengthened and streamlined, as well as what government and corporate policy changes may be needed to protect women's rights and voices online.
- Speak-out & Action: Studying the ways in which women communicate in digital spaces will allow us to identify the factors that make women feel safe, supported and empowered to speak out against violence and discrimination. The Affect Lab brings detailed expertise on participation in online chat forums, and one of their post-doctoral researchers will study engagements on a specific forum focused on violence against women that will be created within the Values Chat APP, a mobile tool which was designed and launched in a previous round of funding.
b) Our engagements with our business and NGO partners will go beyond networking events towards the co-creation of potential digital innovations. The goal would be to understand these organisations' current business models, services and approaches to digitalization. This will ensure that we do not reinvent the wheel, but rather productively build on lessons learnt and leverage these insights to co-create specific pilot projects that could be funded in further phases of the DIDA grant-cycle. For instance, working with Wiconnect will allow us to understand the complex relationship between access to electricity, data and education and explore the potential impact of strengthening women's access to and productive use of digital innovations. By studying Saya-Setona's activities, women's current participation as digital citizens will be explored in order to identify specific factors that could enhance government communication and women's access to government services. We will also work with Praekelt.com, who delivers digital community projects through its sister organisation, Praekelt.org, as well as with OpenUp, which is a civic tech organisation in South Africa focused on open data for active citizenry. By studying their successful digital interventions, particularly those targeted at women, we hope to gain insight into how digital participation can be scaled and supported, and which future interventions would best address the problem of violence against women.

The impact of this project can be described in terms of the populations that we will interact with as part of the networking and co-creation processes. The first step is the establishment of an interdisciplinary research team that will engage with practitioners to answer the research question by meeting the four interrelated objectives, i.e. gaining understanding, access, participation and developing a speak-out culture. This will inform the crafting of distinct work packages led by specific African Co-Is within a broader research project that will be conceptualized by October 2020. A further result will be cross-disciplinary research papers based on the insights emerging from interactions with practitioners, i.e. work that would bridge the theory-practice divide.
As such, businesses, NGOs, grassroots organisations and other stakeholders that will participate in the networking events will also be impacted. These events will offer a unique opportunity for cross-sectoral engagement around the problem of violence against women. The opportunity to give voice to concerns, analyse the root causes of the problem, and to brainstorm solutions, will benefit this cross-sectoral group of stakeholders who will take these insights back to their constituencies. Due to their contact with a variety of societal agents, it may impact policy-development, information-sharing, product development and the selection of further projects that could address various aspects of violence and discrimination against women. The results of the roundtable, public forum and final project workshop will be disseminated, both through the popular press and social media, but also through white papers and more formal policy discussions to which these stakeholders have access.
The most important impacts are however related to the potential societal benefits that the four community interventions, which will be identified in phase 1 (March 2020-October 2020), may have on women in South Africa and potentially in other African countries. This is a more distant impact, since the projects will only be piloted and researched in the further stages of the grant cycle (post October 2020). The main beneficiaries will include women from various communities where the digital innovations will be piloted. Both disadvantaged women who need improved access to digital citizenship, as well as other women who face violence and discrimination in other public and private spaces, will be considered in identifying these digital interventions. If these are successfully implemented in the second phase of the research, women in South Africa and across Africa more broadly will be benefitted, and by extension, also their families, employers, and communities. These interventions may also contribute to the provision of greater access to electricity and other government services, to government information and democratic processes, and to platforms for speaking-out against discrimination and violence, particularly in workplace contexts. Such interventions and innovations would therefore strengthen women's equality, inclusion and rights to expression, and enhance overall well-being.
In addition, the project will support our business and civic partners (e.g. Wiconnect Business, Saya-Setona, Praekelt.org, and OpenUp) to reflect on their business models and current range of digital tools through the lens of addressing women's equality, access and rights to expression. This will include potentially refining existing tools and/or creating new tools and platforms. We will work with each partner in the co-creation of relevant tools to address issues of access to services (electricity, healthcare, justice), access to government information and democratic processes, as well as access to tools that facilitate speaking-out in various contexts. Further knowledge-transfer partnerships could enable the ongoing sharing of information and perspectives, assisting these organisations in remaining sustainable.