Background: In developing countries worldwide, grass roots women’s groups are working on issues of empowerment, including support for democracy and human rights, protection of their environment, economic improvement and reproductive and sexual health. Despite energy, enthusiasm and some successes, these groups often work in isolation, uninformed and not connected to other groups with similar interests both within their own countries and around the world. Many of these groups define themselves as communication organizations - their primary missions are to get messages out to women in rural areas and to do advocacy work within their own culture, nation or region. Many of these groups have computers, phones and fax lines; some have email and Internet capacity as well.

The Pacific Institute for Women’s Health and the University of Southern California Annenberg Center’s Program in Development Communication have received a planning grant to launch a major initiative entitled Women Connect! The Initiative seeks to link with regional umbrella organizations that represent women’s groups in Sub-Saharan African countries to support their missions and capabilities by strengthening communication strategy skills and introducing sustainable telecommunication technology to grass roots organizations.

Our Approach: Email and the Internet have become hot topics in development projects. Many funders and groups are working to wire organizations. We offer a unique perspective on this situation. We feel that wiring groups to the Internet is not sufficient to enhance communication capability or an organization’s broader mission. Rather we take the view that it is only by strengthening an organization’s whole range of communication capacities that it will become more sustainable and able to define its own mission clearly. Thus we offer a two pronged approach. One part will provide technical assistance in how to utilize the new technologies to strengthen partnerships, find sources of funding, stay linked internationally, and learn lessons from sister organizations. The other part seeks to strengthen communication strategy skills by working with groups to define their mission, their outreach efforts, their use of media (from low- end posters and brochures to television and radio programming) and their organizational capability to re-evaluate and sustain these efforts.

Pilot Project and Lessons Learned: We have just completed a pilot project called Women Linking. For the past two years we have worked with an African women’s rights NGO, Action for Development (ACFODE), whose mission is to improve the status and lives of women in Uganda by disseminating messages and providing outreach and advocacy around such issues as inheritance rights, law reform, and equitable representation in local and national government. By partnering with ACFODE on the whole range of communication capacity building issues, we have acquired a great deal of new information about what does and does not work in the field. Among the lessons learned are:

· the necessity to focus on communication strategy and new technology simultaneously in order to build organizational capacity;

· the idea that the introduction of email and Internet connectivity, while being substantively cost effective, can have profound effects on organizational dynamics;

· that strategic communication campaign design planning, research and evaluation are often lacking and campaigns go on indefinitely, stretching limited resources and having little effect;

· that communication interventions, due to their complexity, may need extended time and follow through.

What we have to offer: We intend to identify and build on what is being done rather than to reinvent the wheel. For example, there are umbrella organizations in Africa with substantive connections to grass roots groups. There is work being done to assess what groups in Africa have email and Internet connectivity. We want to bring these elements together. We plan to assess what is being done and to initiate dialogue with regional umbrella groups on the ground that have a history and commitment to working with grass roots women’s organizations as well as an interest in communication technologies.

We plan to design an overall project to provide technical assistance both in use of electronic linking and in communication strategy building. Through our project we hope to link appropriate groups with committed donors in this field. We view our role as connecting the connectors, enlarging the conception of communication interventions, and providing strategy skills for long-term thinking. For more information contact:

Doe Mayer (dmayer@usc.edu) or Lisa Bohmer (lbohmer@piwh.org), Project Co-Directors.