Celebrating Women’s Month: How can technology and digital innovation strengthen women’s voices?
Technology and innovation represent an expansion of the spaces women occupy. Women can exist and do as much now in the online/digital space as in the physical space. Women have used technology and innovation to break barriers, from accessing markets, (for example, women in markets in Uganda innovating with the market garden app), the thousands of women who run their businesses purely online, and multitudes that use social media as a place for advocacy for their rights.
With the focus of CSW67 being innovation and technological change, this conversation will seek to:
- celebrate all the women whose work often needs to be more acknowledged in the technological and innovation fields;
- amplify the contributions of equality as well as challenges of technology to gender equality;
- share the emerging solutions for and by women and girls to innovate, utilize and create an internet and technological space that works for them.
To celebrate Women’s History Month, we are excited to welcome as speaker Sunshine Fionah Komusana, a Ugandan feminist, activist, lawyer and researcher, and a campaign coordinator for #VisibleWikiWomen at Whose Knowledge?.
Sunshine Fionah Komusana (she/her) is joining Whose Knowledge? from Akina Mama wa Afrika, a Pan-African feminist leadership development organisation based in Kampala, Uganda, where she worked as a program associate for sexual reproductive health and rights. Her work within the African feminist movement extends to providing legal aid services; connecting survivors of violence to legal support, therapy services and shelters; and doing advocacy work, legal/policy analysis and research on reproductive justice and violence against women and girls. She is the winner of the World Bank Blogs for Development Contest 2016 and an alumna of the African Women’s Leadership Institute and the African Feminist Macroeconomic Academy. She is also a contributing writer to feminist platforms, including African Feminism and Lakwena. When not behind her desk, she is either buried in a book or tweeting for the revolution @komusana.
Hub Cymru Africa’s Gender Community of Practice is an open group of practitioners with an interest in gender equality and empowerment work, who come together bi-monthly to facilitate peer support, exchange, and learning.