Women based ICT enterprises

Womenic Enterprise is a website that provides information and guidance about different women based ICT enterprises running in developing countries. It includes the following:

- A women's cooperative that assembles personal computers.
- An individual woman running her own cybercafé or telecentre.
- A female entrepreneur plus staff managing a shop selling computer supplies.
- A woman graduate designing Web sites for local businesses.
- Two women providing IT training classes and word processing services.

Some of these initiatives are private based, but most of then are initiated by the government or NGOs. For example, the District Rural Development Agency (DRDA) of the Vishakapatnam district (Andhra Pradesh, India), where I went in May 2006 to do a pilot project of our research systems, is responsible for coordinating the 42 RAJIV (RAJiv Internet Village) kiosks. The first identify women entrepreneurs who are educated up to the high-school levels, train them in using the systems, and then provide loans of up to Rs. 90,000 from which the women buy computers, printers, scanners, digital cameras, and even photocopy machines. It is the women then who operate the kiosks, and they are able to earn up to Rs. 8,000 per month, from which they gradually pay back the loans they borrowed from the government and local banks. The kiosks run different e-governance services such as providing birth, marriage, caste, and income certificates; electricity and telephone bill payments; land records management; and even computer training, resume building, and other educational classes.

The website has a handbook that can be freely downloaded. It has case studies from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, India, Ukraine, and Tanzania; and demonstrate many different ways of creating sustainable women-based ICT enterprises. The handbook is very comprehensive, and outlines best practices for setting up small scale enterprises, analyse demand and plan out expansion or diversification into other services, and even guidelines for agencies to coordinate such enterprises together.

Such initiatives are certainly useful for promotion of gender equality and women empowerment, and have a greater potential for the benefits to reach other members of the family. But just helping women should not be the one and only objective. I will write later about ILS booklets used by Pradan, an India based NGO, where they go beyond just providing microfinance loans to women, to actually working with the entire family and helping them change their lives.