The Challenges of Gendered Digital Divides

Assata Zerai presented findings from her fifth book, on African women, information and communication technologies (ICT), and neoliberal politics. She critiqued an existing World Bank-based model linking mobile phone access to the knowledge economy and good governance as androcentric, and offered revised, women-centered measures tested with demographic and health survey data from Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Malawi. She also described building a database of African women scholars whose work is absent from Western indexes. About twenty minutes of audience Q&A followed.