gigx

I never thought the internet to be knotty. That all I needed was my device of choice, an internet service provider and voila! Get my connection, click, click, click, open up a page, browse through it, close tab, open another, like an update, favorite a tweet, laugh at some memes and move on to the next tab.

Nothing is ever that easy.

In order to strengthen internet governance in Africa, the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) is organising a series of events to take place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, during September 2015. Follow them here.

In the opening session at this year’s Gender and Internet Governance eXchange (gigXAfrica), participants highlighted some key questions they had that they hoped would be answered during the exchange. One participant innocently asked: if the internet is free for all, how are women really marginalized in that space? This is my attempt at a calm response to this question that I am slowly realising…

As the representative of Take Back the Tech! Bangladesh I took the opportunity to give a presentation on the topic- ‘Consent, autonomy and agency: Online violence’ from a Bangladeshi perspective. Case studies of online violence in Bangladesh, government initiatives, campaigns of Take Back the Tech! Bangladesh have been discussed in the presentation.

In the Gender and Internet Governance Exchange (gigX) workshop last month participants from different countries in Asia were asked to arrange a series of words by the “ladder of hierarchy”. Despite our cultural differences, it seemed that we all agreed on one thing – whether married or unmarried - man is always on top.

Since the mid 1980s, more Filipino women than men were leaving the country for various destinations abroad. How do we reach the women working overseas to extend our support to them online? How do we maximize online connectivity so that we can send and receive messages to help migrants?

The Gender and Internet Governance Exchange-Asia (gigX) hosted by the Association for Progressive Communications in partnership with the Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA) gave me an opportunity to learn about the intersection between gender and internet governance in a simple way.

Noemi Lardizabal-Dado was one of the participants in the Gender and Internet Governance Exchange in Asia. In this feminist talk, she shares how she participated with other feminists in the questioning around “what kind of internet do we want and what will it take for us to achieve it?”

To start off our series of gigX, APC in collaboration with the Foundation for Media Alternatives, held a 2-day event on the 29 and 30 June 2015 where advocates from the region came together to exchange knowledge on the intersections of women’s rights and internet governance.