Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) is a non governmental organization that supports and promotes the use of ICTs among women and women organizations for sustainable development. One of the objectives of its program is to support its members to access, utilize and apply ICTs in addressing their development problems through a number of ways including applying innovative and appropriate ICTs in their activities.

Set out to achieve this objective WOUGNET has explored the use of SMS in information sharing and carrying out SMS campaigns around different themes. The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, an international SMS campaign from 25/Nov – 10/Dec 2007, with over 170 participants drawn from 13 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, was used as a strategy to call for the elimination of all forms of violence against women. A Women’s Day campaign was carried out from 25/Feb – 14/Mar 2008 lead by EASSI, a WOUGNET member organisation, with over 240 participants drawn from 20 countries in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. The aim of the campaign was to raise awareness of the plight of the girl-child in Kenya during the post-election violence in the country.

The recently concluded campaign, on ICTs and poverty reduction was quite successful and proves that SMS is a powerful tool of information sharing.  WOUGNET members, partners and interested persons discussed questions sent out by the secretariat on the theme, ‘ICTs: is your wealth a click away? To wrap up the discussion a workshop was organised for participants of the SMS campaign on 6th May 2008, for further discussion on the key issues arising. The SMS and workshop were also a contribution to the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day 2008 held on 17th May, 2008.

The workshop was opened by the Minister of State for ICT, Honorable John Alintuma Nsambu who emphasized the need for ICTs and the opportunities they offer to reach the most rural of the communities. He recognized that the civil society sector was doing much more than the Government in reaching out to the communities in the use and application of ICTs in various sectors of the economy. He commended WOUGNET for the innovative initiative and emphasized that as government they were challenged. He said ICT tools could be used to generate wealth and gave an example of a mobile telephone which could be used to generate income.

Ms Margaret Kakande, a poverty analysis expert made a presentation on the current situation of poverty in Uganda. On the engendered nature of poverty, she said the natural causes and impacts of poverty were different for men and women. Gender inequality was persistent in access to and control of a range of productive, human and social capital assets. ICT has the potential of correcting some of the gender inequalities that limit women’s access/ benefit from development policies and programmes.

Regarding the role of ICT in poverty reduction, she noted that in Uganda the economy had been liberalized and there is competitiveness in every sector including ICT. There is therefore need to enhance women’s productivity in agriculture and the SMEs through provision of information on markets, prices, inputs and other available public services and opportunities.

Through groups participants discussed how ICTs can be integrated into Development plans, ICT indicators that can monitor and evaluate poverty reduction strategies, content and applications in ICT use that are relevant for poverty reduction, ways of strengthen the existing ICT policy to help in reducing poverty and how the private sector can facilitate the use of ICT by the poor.

One participant, Mr. Patrick  Kaija of Byte International Group called for the development of local content to enable people in rural areas understand and use it for development. He also noted that the benefits of using the different ICT tools should be clearly spelt out. Relevant content for the rural communities includes agricultural information, weather, market prices, pest and disease control, health information and mobile banking among others.

Another issue that strongly came out of the meeting was the need to include the interests and needs of people with disability in the National ICT policy framework and the poverty reduction strategies. A participant with disability reported that programs for people with disability don’t reach the grassroots according to the a research they have carried out.

The use of SMS has attracted a lot of interest from members because information can easily be accessed, mobile phones are affordable to many people even in rural areas and unlike emails they don’t have to travel long distances to get access to the information The coordinator of NVIWODA, one of the WOUGNET member organisations had this to say to say, 'the SMS campaign on creating wealth using ICTs was very successful and should be used on other relevant themes. WOUGNET should encourage even the rural communities to participate'. The facilitator of the workshop, Ms Janet Achora noted that putting a face to the SMS campaign was quite good, participants were exited and interesting issues that were omitted during the SMS campaign had come out.

The chairperson of the parliamentary committee on ICTs, Hon. Edward Balidawa closed the workshop. He had this to say on the role of ICTs in poverty eradication; ‘ICTs are catalysts, enhancers in development, in themselves they cannot stand alone. They can be useful in already established structures for example using SMS to reach out to market prices. There is need for transparency, paradigm change, good governance and for leaders to embrace use of ICTs. The challenge lies in showing that ICTs can be used to earn money, sensitizing communities, looking out for workable models that enable rural communities to earn extra income’.