Comments on: Cherryl Broverman's Lecture and Women's Empowerment through Information Technology

I thought Broverman's lecture did a great job of presenting the interesting fact that even while Kenya is a very poor country, many males Kenyans have access to (almost) modern day technology. While most villages don't have running water or bathrooms, they do have internet cafes, and many males Kenyans have cell phones. However, Broverman, as well as the articles, also presented the idea that impoverished women in the countries of Africa don't have any education, gender equality, or access to technology. Ms. Broverman talked about how the WISER initiative is hoping to change this by directly bringing technology to women in Africa, to allow them to learn about AIDS and general health, the politics of their countries, women's rights movements throughout the world, or anything else they can find on the net. In this way, WISER's goal is to educate these women despite a culture that says women are meant to be wives and houseworkers.

Kiva.com, talked about during the lecture, also seems very interesting. It seems like a great way of helping people in Africa make big steps in their lives, while only having to contribute a small amount of money. This is becuase the level of wealth is so much different in the US than in Africa that a little american money is a lot of African value. To me, it seems more like community service to donate this money -- I don't know how many people really want a return on their loans instead of just to help someone in need.

I also thought Broverman's description of the ISIS 200 capstone project was very interesting. The students of this class are working on creating a toolkit to map pictures and places, and people's lives to system sort of like Google Earth, where the region can be explored on the macro level as a map and icons representing picture and events can be clicked on. Its very cool to see students from North Carolina are working to solve a problem half way across the world. I would very much like to see the finished product and how it is actually put to use to analyze different cultural aspects of Africa.