Their Experiences: Smartphones are easier to use than the “Button” phones!
Gwoke Keni, an Acoli word that means “take care of yourself”, is a name of a Community Based Organization (CBO) formed in 2004 to empower the women in the community. Acoli is a language spoken in the Northern part of Uganda, East of Africa. Through the management and guidance of women and men including, Ms. Jane Adong, Rev. Erinayo Oryema and Mr. John Oketch Latworo, the group has since attracted several forms of support from different organizations like World Food Program, Save the Children, among others, and in 2009 it received its first Information and Communication Technology (ICT) support when Cooperazione e Sviluppo (CESVI) provided a desktop computer and solar panel. Other organizations later joined to support in different ways.
Asked how they managed to grow the initiative, Ms. Jane Adong, the community program manager said, “We have relied on donor funding, the contacts we make and in-kind support from well-wishers.” According to Jane, the organization directly contacts individuals and institutions for potential support and individuals or organizations that want to visit to learn or give support to the community like to provide training normally can contact them directly. However, they document all such activities and external support in their quarterly and annual reports and share with respective stakeholders. Since 2014 when Battery Operated System for Community Outreach (BOSCO) Uganda, a community network in Gulu joined other organizations to support them, the center has continued to benefit from the Internet connected to them by BOSCO Uganda.
In December 2019, through the financial support of an individual and friend to the community, Dr. Revi Sterling Sarah, a Gender and Tech advocate, AccessPlus was pleased to respond to the women’s specific request by providing two smartphones, a printer and a larger monitor screen. We wrote a blog post about the training, which can be accessed through this link.
In January 2021 after another invitation call from one of the representatives of Gweki community network, the AcessPlus team represented by Ms.Sarah Kiden and Lillian Achom had a brainstorming discussion to prepare for the community visit including the training approach. In April 2021 a visit to the community was made to evaluate the impact of the first training conducted in 2019 and to establish any additional need for support for the community.
The Cultural perspective
We received feedback from some of the women and girls who had missed out on the first training. Those who had missed the initial training wondered how participants had been selected.
The African culture values community-based living and relationships and it exhibits a sense of communality in the everyday acts of living together. For instance, community meal sharing is a common practice, where at every meal, extended family members bring their foods to be shared. Rejecting one’s food may lead to misinterpretations and misunderstandings.
Similarly, being informed and a part of a community-related event such as training is highly regarded and treated from the cultural point of view. A lack of such information for any reason can result in personal differences which could advance to family or clan differences.
The Experiences
To create an intimate bond and foster participatory feedback from the members, we experimented with our lessons from Stitching Together, an idea shared by Ms. Sarah Kiden. In our case, we allowed the members to be involved in learning and teaching each other new handwork skills as they informally shared their experiences about using smartphones. By the end of the session, not only had they learned from the different experiences of their colleagues, but each person walked away with a hand-made, body cleaning sponge for their personal use which sponges they had each crocheted. See picture of one of the crocheted sponges.
When we delivered the smartphones in December 2019, our goal was for the women to use the phones in turns to explore and “play” with them as they discover their functionalities. We did not anticipate any global pandemic. However, according to Ms. Jane Adong, who is their head and wears many other hats in the village, the phones reached them at a timely moment because at the beginning of 2020 when movements were restricted, she used it to connect to the hospitals to deliver medicines to particular homes and to access information about COVID-19 pandemic.
Like any other regular user, Ms. Jane, who is in her mid 50s says she finds the phone very addictive because she checks her WhatsApp messages every 15-20 minutes in a day. She says that she enabled notifications on the phone because Makerere University had resorted to using WhatsApp to send classwork and also make communications regarding school. Through WhatsApp and using the same phone, she got information about her internship placements where she enrolled successfully.
Mrs. Okello says that after learning to use the smartphone, she found out that even with more sophisticated functionalities, smartphones are a lot easier to use compared to the basic phones, commonly known as “button phones” in the rural areas, except for the high costs. Asked if she has purchased a smartphone, Mrs. Okello said she has never bought one for herself.
Ms. Harriet Akot is a form 3 student in one of the local schools in Patongo. But unlike during our previous visit, this time she was not the usual jovial girl in her adolescent age that we had previously met. She was more reserved and withdrawn. Perhaps she is maturing? So I thought!
Harriet said she found the phone most useful especially during the time her dad was consistently sick during the lockdown. Since she was handling an emergency situation, other members allowed her to use it most of the time because she needed to be in touch with the doctors, relatives and friends about the condition of her dad. The last time Harriet used the phone was when she called the doctor home to give medication/first aid to her dad, to enable him to reach an immediate health facility about 3 kilometers away for better treatment. He was later referred to the hospital about 25km away, from where he passed on.
We also learned that Harriet was very attached to her dad hence the possible reason for her withdrawn self.
We found Ms. Vicky Aol had planned to go and visit her friend in Lakwar village, about 3 kilometers away but postponed it because she wanted to participate in our evaluation exercise scheduled for the same day. She said that she had not seen or heard from her friend for over 2 months, meaning she had not been getting her medication, hence her decision to make a physical follow up. Her worry stemmed from the fact that after several illnesses, she had encouraged the friend to test for HIV/AIDS and when she did, she tested positive. Ever since then, she feels it is her responsibility to ensure that the friend accepts the situation and is not affected by stigmatization.
Ms. Vicky says that possessing phones would help them to remind each other about schedules for acquiring medicine through calls without necessarily having to travel long distances to check on one another.
Mr. Ojok, a husband to one of the members said technology and phones in particular are very important. He however says that many men believe that there is certain information that women are not supposed to access, for instance information about family planning. According to him, traditionally, a woman is supposed to produce as many children as possible but with smartphones, such “unwanted” information and videos are at their disposal. This is causing gender-based violence. To change the narrative, Mr. Ojok recommends sensitization for the men and allowing them to explore the benefits of smartphones.
Conclusion
Regardless of the community development initiatives that we would like to implement in the communities, the evolving technologies and the changing trends of communication, the lesson we learn is that studying the culture of the community and addressing their needs from the cultural perspective is key in achieving the community developmental goals.
The COVID-19 Pandemic affected everyone globally but not everyone was equally affected. This is evident by the fact that while it brought and connected more people online; like the education systems adapting to online learning and the working class resorting to working from home, the already unconnected communities were further disconnected because of the high cost of communication devices and the Internet.
In our effort to ensure that each of the women owns a smartphone as opposed to using in turns, we are accepting any financial support to enable us to purchase 15 smartphones for 15 members of the community.
Written by Lillian, Review by Sarah Kiden and Esther Patricia
