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How can digital technology empower women without worsening inequality?

Sara Chamberlain — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 15:26:28 +0000

As use of mobile technologies surges in low and middle income (LMICs) countries, a pressing question has emerged: can the digital revolution be harnessed to empower women – socially, economically and politically - without creating deeper social and gender divides?

This is a particularly critical question in India, where the rates of digital adoption are high – but where the gender gap in digital is among the largest in the world. According to the GSMA, 75% of men but only 55% of women owned a mobile phone in 2020; when it comes to smartphones, the gap is even greater, with only 25% of women owning smartphones compared to 41% of men.

In 2019, �� Media Action began working on the Digital Women’s Economic Empowerment Project: A Research and Learning Agenda. Our focus has been on women’s collectives, which have shown significant promise as a platform for empowerment. Our objective has been to identify if and how digital technology could enhance pathways to women’s empowerment in collectives, without making existing inequalities and gender-based conflict worse.

The promise of collectives

from countries around the world, including from self help groups in India, have shown promising outcomes for women’s economic and political empowerment, mobility, and control over family planning. In India, the scale of the opportunity is substantial: Some 47 million member-households have been mobilised into four million self-help groups since 2011, and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development’s Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme now covers 138 million families through 11 million groups.

Evidence reviews have also identified three important pathways to empowerment in self-help groups: the accumulation of social capital, human capital, and financial capital.

the expansion of women’s social networks , as they join small groups of 10-12 women and begin benefiting from ‘bonding social capital’ – the social support and trust that cohesive, homogenous groups can provide. Once women start interacting with the wider collective, they begin building “bridging social capital’ – that is, interacting with women from different backgrounds who act as role models and provide access to new ideas and opportunities.

Women in a self-help group show their mobile phones. Even though India is the world's largest market for social media platforms, users are overwhelmingly male. Photo credit: Sara Chamberlain, �� Media Action.

Limits on progress

However, there are constraints on the transformative potential of women’s collectives in India:

Geographically isolated groups have few opportunities to engage beyond their immediate circle with the wider collective;
Women have limited channels to request and receive targeted information, resources, and services from the wider collective;
Grassroots members have limited opportunities to make their voices heard in the wider collective;
The lack of access to high quality, standardised, flexible learning opportunities;
Members tend to be older and less educated, and younger women are under-represented;
There are limited opportunities for consultative decision-making, and leadership may not be transparent.

Digital technology could be a game changer

Chat applications and social media platforms, as social networking tools, could help women’s collectives overcome many of the constraints they face – for example, by:

Reducing geographical isolation, enabling women to interact more regularly with their wider collectives.
Improving internal information dissemination and consultative decision making by collective leadership.
Improving the bottom-up flow of information from grassroots members to collective leadership to transnational partners, amplifying marginalised voices.
Diversifying group membership by attracting younger women.
Helping collectives trying to scale to overcome challenges of transparency and leadership ossification by offering new growth pathways to young and emergent leaders.

Collectives could also use digital technologies to accelerate the accumulation of human capital by providing flexible, personalised digital learning to members, and the accumulation of financial capital by providing greater access to government entitlements and markets for their products and services.

Self-help groups in India pose a major opportunity for digital technologies that can empower women. Photo credit: Sara Chamberlain, �� Media Action

Low tech digital solutions have delivered results

There are already examples of low-tech digital solutions achieving some of these goals for disadvantaged women in India, including for women in collectives. For example:

, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) social media platform for rural communities in India, enables women in self help groups to call a number to record an audio message about their community, or to listen to messages left by others. Over 100,000 unique users have been calling Mobile Vaani every month in the states of Bihar and Jharkhand, discussing a wide range of issues and sharing information, including health information during the COVID-19 pandemic.
equips women in self help groups who already own smartphones with an application to support claims for government entitlements, helping 600,000 people claim entitlements in 22 Indian states.
�� Media Action has used IVR to deliver impactful, cost-effective audio learning to rural, low-income women at scale in India for almost a decade – for example, delivering free health information to over 10 million families, and successfully training 200,000 frontline health workers in 13 Indian states in collaboration with the Indian government, .
During the pandemic, �� Media Action began collaborating with capacity building organisations - for instance, to provide IVR-based learning in agricultural best practices to marginalised women farmers in self help groups in the state of Bihar, and with to support digital adoption and digital literacy in self help groups in Madhya Pradesh.

The gender digital divide

However, the transformative potential of digital to support women’s empowerment in India is constrained by the gender digital divide, including on social media. In 2018, LIRNEasia estimated that only 9% of women aged 15–65 were using social media in India, compared with 22% of men. In addition, although India is now globally the largest market for platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, these are still heavily skewed towards male users. For example, according to estimates from publicly available advertising data, only 8% of Twitter users and 24% of Facebook users in India were women, as of January 2021. Even though more women began using the mobile internet during the pandemic, with usage increasing from 21% in 2019 to 30% in 2021, social media use did not reflect this: Facebook usage among women increased by just 1% during the pandemic, and Twitter usage among women fell by 6%.

Social media users in India tend to be younger, better educated, wealthier and urban

Wealth and education are the strongest determinants of access to and use of mobile phones in India, but age and geography also matter. In 2018, a study by LIRNEasia found that only 5% of social media users in India had only a primary school education or had never been to school, and only 11% lived in rural areas. The same study found that only 10% of 36–45-year-olds had used social media in 2018. Although social media use among adolescents in India has increased since then, the gender gap is the most extreme in this age group. For example, a survey by the Population Council in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in 2018–2019 found that 33% of 15–19-year-old girls who had completed fifth grade or higher had used social media, compared with 70% of boys in the same age group.

Women and men also behave differently on social media in India. Men tend to be more active participants in digital groups than women, with the most active users being men with other forms of social privilege. Most women (92%) use social media to stay in touch with existing friends and family, rather than to make new friends (38%), which could limit their access to new ideas, opportunities and ways of doing things – the accumulation of bridging social capital.

Women's access to mobile phones is often controlled by men, so face to face communication is also essential. Photo credit: Sara Chamberlain, �� Media Action

The role of gender norms

Gender norms - offline and online – are another constraint. Women’s use of mobile phones and the internet are often supervised and monitored by men, which limits the agency and freedom that digital technology could provide women. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence is rife in India, and nearly always against women. Research suggests that over 58% of women internet users have faced online sexual harassment of some form, most commonly on social media. While India has legislation on cyberbullying, cyber-stalking and online sexual harassment, victims of online gender-based violence do not usually seek legal recourse. Social media platforms have been grappling with the issue of online violence since their inception. However, despite best efforts, online violence and harassment remain pervasive issues.

Implications for designing social media interventions for women

The gender digital divide on social media platforms in India, and the offline and online norms that create the divide, necessitate a gender-intentional, research driven approach to designing social media interventions for women’s empowerment.

We need to begin with a gender analysis of who has access to digital technology and why, and who is excluded and why.
We also need to understand women’s level of digital skill among the population we aim to serve, as well as their usage habits and the factors shaping their use, including the implications of shared and supervised mobile phone use for privacy and data protection.
We need to design differentiated digital strategies, using appropriate digital channels and tools, to meet a diversity of needs.
We need to use women-centred design methodologies to co-create solutions with women who represent different segments of the target population, to improve accessibility, usability and relevance.
We must remember that face-to-face communication remains key to women in the target population who don’t own, or have meaningful access to, mobile phones – or the skills or permission to use one.
We require processes to respond to online harassment and violence that may be triggered by your intervention.
And we need to be patient. Test and re-test because there is the potential to do as much harm as good.

The third paper in our learning series offers more insights:

Learn more about our Digital Women's Economic Empowerment learning and research agenda here. The project is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and includes partners at Chaitanya WISE, PRADAN, the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, and the University of Denver, Colorado.

Helping people spot fake news in Sierra Leone

George Ferguson — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 08:00:00 +0000

National elections are always a fascinating experience when working for �� Media Action. Frequently played out in fragile governance contexts, national elections are generally viewed as a key milestone in the democratic progress of a country.

For the recent elections in Sierra Leone, rapidly increasing levels of access to social media – particularly among young people – had created an important and influential space for political discussion. In 2009, around 2% of people had internet access nationally. By 2016, 16% of people aged 15-30 nationally had access to the internet, rising to 48% in urban areas, with the vast majority using Facebook and WhatsApp on a smartphone.

Irresponsible media content not only has the potential to distort or misinform voters; at worst, it can be used to incite political violence through hate speech. This threat was taken seriously by the government of Sierra Leone in the run up to the election. At one stage in 2017, the Information Minister stated on national radio that the government might ‘close down social media’ if they perceived it to pose a credible threat to national security. As in so many political contexts, security concerns over ‘fake news’ seemed to be threatening the most basic of democratic freedoms: the rights of access to information and freedom of expression.

Finding a balance between national security and personal freedom – particularly on social media – is something that governments and societies continue to struggle with. The development of social media represents a steep learning curve for many in Sierra Leone, where education remains an issue and where inappropriate content and misinformation can spread alarmingly quickly (as evidenced during the 2017 mudslide and 2014/15 Ebola crisis).

One thing could be said of social media spaces during the 2018 election: they were going to be busy. Whether this would be busy-good or busy-bad remained to be seen. Managing , the �� Media Action office in Freetown was in a strong position to reach its 500,000 followers, and beyond, with trusted and independent media content.

Data from a 2016 national audience survey, as well as from analysis of our own social media metrics, helped to provide a unique set of insights into online audiences in Sierra Leone. The team in Freetown decided early on during the project design that we would not have the resources to directly fact-check or counter fake news reports ourselves. Instead we decided to help both audiences and practitioners increase what the wider �� is calling ‘media literacy’ – the ability to better identify misinformation and therefore more effectively navigate social media spaces.

As part of UNDP’s conflict mitigation programme, and with funding from UK Aid, we developed a programme of activities designed to increase responsible use of social media during the elections. We did two things with this support. Firstly, we designed and delivered a series of in-depth training sessions on responsible use of social media to three key groups: journalists, election management bodies, and young people who are active on social media. Secondly, we produced a range of media content (films and graphics) to inform wider audiences about more responsible use of social media.

Research findings showed that the training was effective in increasing knowledge around responsible use of social media. Following their training, there was a 25% increase in the number of participants who agreed with the statement ‘I can identify untrue news stories or fake news’. The ‘zebra crossing technique’, , was especially helpful in reminding participants to cross-check and verify information and the source of stories before sharing them.

We produced a wide range of content for broadcast on our Sierra Leone Facebook page. These posts attempted to explain how to identify fake news and misinformation, inform followers of the legal implications of sharing other people’s posts, and share tips about online safety. For all our posts about the responsible use of social media during the elections period, the average ‘reach’ was 43,500 people per post. This was measured through our Facebook page metrics and doesn’t capture the additional reach achieved through individuals choosing to share our content on other platforms such as WhatsApp.

When the election went to a second-round run-off, political tensions increased and the rhetoric from politicians started to exploit religious and tribal differences. This was also evident in inappropriate and offensive user-generated content circulating on social media platforms at the time. Yet it seems that this did not result in political violence, as many feared it might. The people of Sierra Leone remained calm, turned out to vote, and managed a largely peaceful transition of power. Whilst it’s not possible to directly attribute our work to this achievement, we believe that an increase in media literacy among Sierra Leoneans online made a valuable contribution to building social resilience to misinformation.

George Ferguson is �� Media Action's Country Director in Sierra Leone

The role of social media in development

Rosie Parkyn — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 08:00:00 +0000

Why should development organisations care about social media? Rosie Parkyn looks at social media’s potential to enhance development outcomes in the Global South and how this stacks up against the evidence.

At �� Media Action, we take our content to people wherever they are, be that , . Our work as a media organisation makes the biggest difference when we succeed in getting people talking, whether face-to-face or across virtual networks. Social media enables such discussion, broadening it beyond geographically defined communities and existing editorial agendas, and at a scale hitherto unimaginable.

As a development organisation that predominantly produces mass media outputs, social platforms allow us to see how people respond to our content and debate the issues we raise in our programmes. We can observe and interact with audiences in a way that isn’t possible with legacy media like newspapers and TV.

It’s true that many of our most important . Nonetheless, its role and influence within the information ecosystems we work in will only grow and its ability to support positive development outcomes demands exploration.

Facilitating discussion, inspiring action and enabling engagement

Perhaps the most obvious advantage social media brings to the table is . It can grant visibility to their experiences, provide a venue for discussion and offer a platform for direct participation, even enabling people to speak directly to the powerful. And because of its built-in multiplier effect, social media can vastly speed up the diffusion of information, ideas, practices, values and social norms that support positive change.

It’s also worth emphasising that social media needn’t just reinforce echo chambers. Our experience shows that it can be used to . Libya, for example, is the home of our first , (For Everyone) which strives to bring people impartial and trusted information in an environment where journalism is . When working to end Ebola in Sierra Leone, to identify what rumours were circulating, allowing us to quickly address them in radio shows broadcast across the country.

Social media can also serve as a tool for organising and taking action. This is critical for achieving what many see as its most transformative potential: enabling people to set out elsewhere in the media.

In addition it has the potential to reach segments of society who don’t consume much mainstream media. Our shows in and are using Facebook to spark discussion and participation among young, urban audiences who don’t watch a lot of terrestrial TV, relying increasingly on Facebook on smartphones for entertainment and information.

But what does the evidence say?

Yet despite the optimism about what social media can achieve, evidence appears limited – and sometimes contradictory. simply states that there isn’t much evidence of the impact of social media in developing countries.

The most intensive scrutiny of the relationship between social media and politics is found in analysis of the Arab uprisings. Social media was instrumental to the uprisings because it provided a means to transform individualised, localised and community-specific dissent into a collective consciousness and shared opportunity for action. As one Egyptian protestor put it at the time: “”.

In this way, , social media reinforced “cultural values conducive to participation in popular protest movements”. further argues that sharing videos relating to regime violence and electoral fraud appear to have contributed to new norms against such behaviour.

However, on a sustained basis. , arguing that it gives a perception of participation that may actually reduce effective, real world action.

In addition, greater transparency doesn’t necessarily equate to better debate or meaningful participation by politicians.

A of the intense social media usage in the run-up to the Ugandan election notes that both President Museveni and his then-challenger Amama Mbabazi are “active tweeps with huge numbers of followers”. Mbabazi actually announced his candidacy on YouTube and held a 3-hour online press conference at his home, running under the hashtag #AskAmama.

However, throughout the campaign, online analyses of policy positions and political objectives were mostly overshadowed by discussions about rumours, allegations of misconduct, personal attacks and which candidate pulled the bigger crowds.

In , Evgeny Morozov issues even harsher warnings about the way in which some regimes use social networks to spread propaganda and suppress nascent democratic movements.

What we do know for certain is that social media is here to stay. It’s consequently incumbent on media and development organisations alike to figure out how to use it – and to use it well. That’s why we’re escalating our own efforts to build the evidence base in this continually exciting area.

is the Country Director for �� Media Action in Indonesia. Previously, Rosie was the organisation’s Head of Advisory and Policy.