Asian Women’s Resource Exchange
WomanAction 2000 | Global Content
- INTRODUCTION
- WHAT IS AWORC?
- PARTICIPATING ORGANISATIONS
- AWORC WEBSITE
- AWORC & THE FIVE-YEAR REVIEW OF THE BEIJING PLATFORM FOR ACTION
As the world enters a new millennium, women face new challenges in an era characterized by profound changes in how we communicate and how we produce, use and distribute information. ICT have made it possible for individuals, communities, nations and regions to interact and to share information and to communicate on a global level and scale and with a speed and ease that was unimaginable just a decade ago. If used critically and democratically, these technologies can be potentially powerful tools not only for economic development but also for promoting commonly held values of peace, justice and equality, including gender equality.
Most Asian countries are now part of this global information and communication exchange. Experts’ estimate that ten years from now, 70% of those on the Internet will be people living outside the United States. While the region’s online population grows rapidly, women’s presence in this new communicational space lags behind. Access to the ICT, especially the Internet, is particularly difficult for women in poorer and less urbanized areas where telecommunications infrastructures are poor. The problem lies not only in access to technology but also involves factors related to lack of equipment and other resources, absence of skills and training and language accessibility.
Under these circumstances, addressing the inequities in access and use of computer information and communications technologies for women becomes critical for our empowerment and economic development. A survey conducted by the Association for Progressive Communication Women's Networking Support Program (APC-WNSP) in 1996, with Isis International-Manila as the regional focal point for Asia, found that despite economic and social obstacles, women are taking great strides in adopting electronic communications. This increased communication and sharing of knowledge has broadened the scope of online participation creating more equitable global women's forum online. Since then, a growing number of women's organizations has begun using these technologies for information, communication, advocacy and networking, despite limited opportunities to gain skills required to better utilize these technologies. At the same time, more women are discovering the value of these new technologies to support economic livelihoods and development.
WHAT IS AWORC?
The Asian Women’s Resource Exchange (AWORC) is an Internet-based women’s information service and network in Asia. It is an inititive geared towards developing cooperative approaches and partnerships in increasing access and exploring applications of new information and communication technologies (ICT) for women’s empowerment.
AWORC aims to help expand existing regional networks in the women’s movement, promote electronic resource-sharing, and build a regional information service that will support various women’s advocacies, specifically those that are very critical for the women in Asia.
AWORC aspires to contribute to global efforts to address gender disparity on the Internet. It is geared towards building and promoting sustainable Net literacy, and enhancing social activism among individual women and women’s organisations.
These include lobbying and awareness raising campaigns towards poverty alleviation, promotion of women’s human rights and over-all women’s empowerment as articulated in the Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA). AWORC seeks to provide avenues for women to develop skills in using new information and communication technologies to enhance their areas of work, and to use Internet facilities to provide greater access to information, analyses and resources to various sectors of women for solidarity building, strengthening gender analyses, and developing partnerships with other key actors.
AWORC resulted from a workshop organized by Isis International-Manila on 20-23 April 1998 to explore strategies for electronic resource sharing and networking among women's information and resource centers in the region. It is part of our continued effort to develop empowering information and communication models that strengthen the women’s movement in our region.
Participating Organisations
The members of the growing AWORC community include women’s information, resource and documentation centres, women’s information providers and users; as well as communications organisations working closely with women’s networks. To date, AWORC has 11 members organisations, namely:
Training and networking support for AWORC are provided by JCA-NET, an online-communications organization, and the Association for Progressive Communication Women’s Networking Support Program (APC-WNSP). As an Internet based information service and network, one of AWORC’s main strategies is to build a web site containing multi-lingual resources and databases highlighting contemporary and critical issues of women in the region. The information in the web site will be searchable through the continuous development of a multi-lingual search mechanism.
AWORC will pay special attention to bringing offline information online and inter-linking online resources about women’s issues and the women’s movement in Asia. It will also serve as a communication channel among women’s organizations in this region in support of their advocacies.
AWORC & THE FIVE-YEAR REVIEW OF THE BEIJING PLATFORM FOR ACTION
In the year 2000, five years after the 1995 Fourth World Conference on women held in Beijing, the United Nations General Assembly will convene a special session to assess progress achieved in the implementation of the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women, and of the Beijing Platform for Action. The special session entitled "Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development And Peace For The Twenty-First Century" will take place on 5-9 June 2000 at the UN Headquarters in New York.
Emphasizing their important role in implementing the Beijing Platform for Action, the General Assembly has called the active involvement of NGOs in preparations for this special session.
Central to AWORC’s participation in the review process in the Asia Pacific is the development of the Beijing+5 site. Launched in March 1999 at the CSW Meeting, Beijing+5 highlights resources, activities and organizations of women in the region as we count down to June 2000. It serves as an information and communication channel for women's organizations working on various aspects of the review process.
Beijing+5 is a collaborative undertaking of AWORC and the Asian Caucus, a network of women's organizations in Asia that coordinates regional participation to the UN commission on Status of Women meetings and has initiated preparations for the five-year review within the region.
On-Site Reporting
AWORC provides on-site reporting during the major events leading up Women 2000.
On-site Training and Public Access Centres
AWORC’s involvement in the various meetings/events leading up to Women 2000 also include setting up Public E-mail and Internet Access Centers. Representatives from AWORC run these centres and provide assistance and training on e-mail and Internet use for participants. AWORC’s capacity to provide these centres is dependent on the availability of resources and facilities in the venues of the meetings/events.
WENT ’99
The Women’s Electronic Network Training Workshop (WENT'99) held on June 21-26, 1999. WENT 99 was organized to train key women's organizations to effectively use Internet-based communication tools to exchange and disseminate information on the BPFA Review and to enhance their overall ability to utilise these technologies for on-going national development programmes. The training workshop was hosted by the Asia Pacific Women’s Information Network (APWIN), a member organisation of AWORC, a center specializing in training women in information technology based at the Sookmyung Women’s University.
WENT ’99 was participated in by 23 women representing organisations involved in the BPFA Review in the region. WENT 99 graduates were women from Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan and Thailand. Five of them represented regional women's organizations based in Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Two other participants were from regional intergovernmental bodies. The participants were mostly information officers, librarians or involved in the information and communication work in their respective organisations.
At the end of the training , the participants agreed to continue sharing information and collaborating in the B+5 review in the region. The e-mail list set up for pre-workshop coordination, <aworc-went99@isiswomen.org> is now being actively used the participants, trainers and the AWORC members for information sharing and dissemination on the review process, post- training technical support, and coordination for review activities.
Five-year Review of Women & ICT
On September 2, 1999, during the AP Women 2000 NGO Symposium, AWORC convened a special interest group workshop called, "Information and Communication Technologies: An Agenda for Women". Co-hosted by Isis International-Manila and Asia Pacific Women’s Information Network (APWIN), the workshop aimed to discuss the rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) and its impact on women's advancement. The panel speakers covered the issues of women’s rights to equal and democratic access to ICT, including women’s experiences in working for gender equality in the design, implementation, access and use of these technologies and in the policy decisions and frameworks that regulate them.
This workshop was held as an initial activity towards conducting the five-year regional review of women and ICT. The findings of this research will help identify the information and communication needs and gaps of women in the region which will also be valuable in determining the developmental direction of AWORC. The research is also geared towards producing a report and policy recommendations for Women 2000.
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