 Hi everyone, my name is Nima Ayer and this is my first tic-tac and I'm really excited to be part of the virtual online conference. So today I am going to talk to you about the African Feminist Future of Civic Technology and I'm just going to go through what I'm going to talk about. So first I'll talk a little bit about the organization which is policy and then I'll walk you through two recent studies that we've done, one on online gender-based violence and the other one is on the impact of the social media taxes in Uganda and then I'm briefly going to talk about African Feminisms and the feminist principles of the internet before trying to actually answer this question. So I'm just going to dive right in. So about policy. So I am the founder of this civic tech organization which is called policy and it's based in Kampala, Uganda and we work at the intersection of data design and technology and we're really just a group of technologists and creatives that are working to transform service delivery in the African context and we do this through a combination of research, tech development, trainings and advocacy. So as I said I would love to talk to you about this research piece that we're actually not yet published or about to publish it in the next few weeks and as part of this research we did a broad based quantitative and qualitative survey in five countries across Sub-Saharan Africa which were Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Senegal and South Africa and in all we spoke to about 3,500 women because we wanted to understand what their online lived experiences were like for women accessing the internet and living in the African context and so we had a couple of main research questions which were you know how prevalent is online gender-based violence in these countries that we're studying, what are the policies and laws that exist to protect women in these countries, how do social media platforms and other intermediaries respond to this online gender-based violence and then the last question we had is what practices do women in these countries take to tackle these issues of online gender-based violence because as often the owner's fault is women to be responsible for protecting themselves and what we found what we were actually thinking you know is that if we're going to build civic technology tools how does the experience of women online impact how they use these tools because in a lot of countries across the world in African countries a lot of services are being warmed online and actually taken off from online ways and how does that impact how women in turn access these services whether it's getting a new passport or a driver's license or doing your taxes and what we found out is that about 30% of women across all these different countries that experience some form of online gender-based violence and interestingly for a lot of women the internet is social media so when you talk about you use the internet it's really like yeah use WhatsApp and Facebook and that is the whole internet for them and this is of course obviously where they were experiencing a lot of this violence as you can see in the chart here a majority of it taking place on the top four which are Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter and this was quite similar across all five countries like maybe one or two would move up and down but that was where most of these cases were happening and what we found most troubling is that a lot of women resorted to leaving these platforms completely as you can see about this is in the case of Kenya but it's very similar across the countries and people were you know blocked to delete the perpetrators but in a lot of cases they completely deleted or deactivated their online selves you know to get away from whatever they were experiencing and 16% of people in the case of Kenya stopped using the online service altogether so this is a troubling statistic that we're seeing but for us we found that you know even choosing our sample size for the study was a bit of a difficult question because we opted to only speak to women who had access to a smartphone which meant that they had access to the internet and so we didn't speak to women who didn't have a foreign access to the internet which actually in Uganda is a huge proportion it's about you know anywhere from 60% of women and previous research from the web foundation for example has shown that women are even apprehensive about joining the internet at all because of these fears they have about being hacked or being scammed or being harassed so these are all very troubling statistics and yeah some of the stories we heard were really quite troubling in most of the countries you know about 90% of women were not even aware of laws to protect them and even if these laws exist the implementation is very questionable and I'll just quickly read to you what one of the women we spoke to in Ethiopia told us which was after that incident I immediately stopped using social media especially Facebook for around a year the other women in my country I think most of them they stop using social media because it is so hard to describe to others even if we are victims but the problem is still ours nobody wants to defend us nobody wants to stand with us even I heard some cases these days those young high school teenage girls committed suicide because of online violence everybody is there to blame you nobody wants to understand you it is up to you and really only you so these are kind of the sentiments that we got out of this study and you know we're seeing these rising rates of online violence and yesterday as our keynote speaker Anjala mentioned these platforms are based in the UK in the US and it's questionable about how they deal with these cases that are happening across the African continent we have so many diverse languages can all the content moderators respond to them what's being done we're seeing a lot of women who are self-censoring or they're finding fewer options to run to they're leaving online services or they're not joining them at all the next study that we did also trying to look at the impact of the way new laws are being constructed about access and how does this impact women's access to the internet and so in Uganda we have something called the social media tax and this is two cents two us dollar cents that you have to pay on a daily basis to access you know about 40 different social media platforms whatsapp twitter tinder skype google hangouts this all falls under social media and when this law was passed there was really very little public consultation and it's still very unsure about what where does that revenue go like there's just no transparency around it and we wanted to find out how does this tax affect how people access used and are productive on the internet because as I said earlier for a lot of people social media is the internet so if you're not on there you're not connected and again how does this impact the digital gender divide and I'll quickly tell you some of the stats which were we found that 35% of people used it for income generation activities and since the tax was passed two years ago there's been a 60% reduction in income and you know when we did our studies talked about a thousand people and for about a quarter of them they've made less than 100,000 shillings a month which is 27 US dollars and so for them just the tax alone is about five to six percent of their income and that's not even counting buying the data to access the internet previously a lot of people were trying to resort to using VPNs but we're seeing that that number is reducing because VPNs consume a lot of data and they also really drain batteries and more troubling we found that a lot of women were really struggling to pay this additional tax on top of paying the data women were more likely to spend less money on mobile data they were likely to earn less they were more likely to complain that their data bundles finished quickly and to express dissatisfaction about the volume of data they had to spend and in turn they were more likely to forego accessing the internet altogether so again this reinforces you know that for many women social media is the internet and a lot of policies and the way tools are being built is very restrictive on how they can access the internet and how they can access technology tools in general and it's more worrying because a lot of countries across Africa are starting to pass similar laws such as in Tanzania where there's a 900 per year blogging fee you have to pass a bunch of hurdles to actually get a license to just have any kind of blog and other countries are thinking about adding taxes on Skype and other white services so I just wanted to now shift gears a little bit and talk about the feminist principles of the internet and then how this ties back to civic technology and so there's five main categories of these feminist principles of the internet and I think they're all very interesting in how they relate to the internet but also I think to the field of civic technology and the first one is access which it relates to access to the internet but also access to information and in terms of the internet it's you know keeping it affordable open meaningful and maintaining equal access which of course something like the social media tax doesn't maintain equal access for everyone because people earn differently and people have different contexts in which they access the internet and access to information also includes like diversity in languages and abilities and interests and the different types of content and for example in the case of Uganda almost all the platforms exist in English and you know we have over 50 languages so this effectively makes it impossible for a wide variety of people to access government services access basic technology access social media the next one is movement building which focuses on public participation and mobilization because the internet of course has become a place for new citizenships new forms of resistance for taking up space in new ways and for democratizing internet governance as a whole so what say do African women have in the overall governance of how the internet is run which at present is not much the next one is economy so thinking about alternative forms of economy because um yeah presently a lot of technology is focused on privatization on profit on corporate control and and this is looking more at a need for you know for cooperation for solidarity for sustainability and for openness so there's a big focus on keeping things open source um yeah the next one is expression so freedom of expression using the internet to amplify voices of different women from across the world then we have embodiment a big part of this that I'm going to concentrate on is consent and data and privacy so it focuses on the ethics and politics of consent on culture design policy in terms of services as well as the right to privacy and to full control of a personal data and information online and it also tackles this issue of online gender based violence which of course we discussed earlier and so the next point is moving into feminist research of state technology so talking about feminist research there is a need to integrate gender related issues and concerns into how we conduct research and design and also highlighting the gaps between that research and then the policy implementation um a big part of you know feminist thinking is that whatever structural inequalities are in the physical world those same inequalities are replicated online so basically technology can be used to either reinforce embody or disrupt those very same inequalities um you know we can take the example of surveillance so women have often been in target of surveillance but technology has made that even easier you know in these days to do that and then the other part that we're talking about is you know when we talk about civic technology we actually have to really consider that there's about two billion women in the world who don't have access to the internet at all or even to you know new forms of technology so how can we think differently about conducting research which is inclusive and includes women who are not online at present and then very briefly don't want to spend too much time talking about this um African feminisms um how is that different from normal feminisms how does how does any of this differ from feminism in general and the main topic here is that that there's a bigger focus here on things like ethnicity race tradition and then um globalism colonialism imperialism how do all those factors come together to impact women's lived experiences and i think this um this aspect of globalism is especially important given that a lot of our technologies um the very basis of them is from other countries and we're having to adapt to using those within our context so that's one of the main reasons i wanted to bring that up and then just diving into what do we mean by feminist technology so it's any technological innovation that aims to enhance the lives of women in the pursuit of equality and so when when i'm thinking about civic technology i'm really thinking about who is who is designing it who is marketing it and who is using it like are those three things in sync with one another or are they not because right now i don't think that they're in sync i think the person who designs it the person market person uses it i think they all have very different perspectives if we're thinking of it from the african context and some of this work that we have to do in research and thinking is how do we align that more so that you know there's it works for everyone involved and yeah i think my 20 minutes are almost up and so we're coming back to the original question so what does the feminist future of civic technology look like and i think the first thing is that we have to think beyond and imagine beyond our current systems of how things work and sometimes it feels like we're already here how can we think beyond this let's just build on top of it but if we analyze what does it look like at present like for us a lot of the technology is developed in the west it's quite white it's quite masculine it's quite heterosexual a lot of it is english speaking and maybe if we can start from there and thinking about the feminist principles of the internet and ask ourselves these questions that you know is it possible for us to completely rethink how platforms are designed marketed and used like i don't think it's too late in that process to think about redesigning i think they've even conversations about you know redesigning a different form of the internet all together can we think for example about moving away just from browser and text-based forms of platforms to moving more to things that are more voice-based or more hyper localized the questions of are we are we obsessed with scale is always a question of scale and the question of replicability but maybe some some problems are so specific to some village in Uganda and maybe that's all it has to be developed for not something that you know everyone in Uganda can use um how can we embody some of the principle the feminist principles of the internet when we build solutions and really taking into account topics of consent and openness and cooperation and how they're being built for for example building a tech portal in in in English in Kampala how does how is a woman in northern Uganda going to make full use of that um and yeah just to wrap up you know if for a lot of people if for a lot of women social media is the internet how does that impact how the internet access technology services most of these social media platforms are designed for and buy different people to people in these contexts and i think we need to think in a radically different way of how can we develop feminist technologies and i don't really have the answers at present but i hope that this is the start of thinking and having conversations and dialogues on what this different reality could look like so i'll close it with there and i'm open to your questions