Michigan State University, in partnership with the Institute of African Democracy (IAD), the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), and the West African Research Centre (WARC), requests funding to promote the participation of women in politics and democratic governance through information sharing and network building. The program will involve participants from NGOs and other grassroots organizations, educational centers, and political associations from four West African countries. It is jointly hosted by H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences OnLine, the African Studies Center, and the Women and International Development Program at Michigan State University. During the fall of 1999 and 2000, this program will bring to the United States a select group of West African human rights specialists, democracy activists, NGO leaders, educators, scholars, journalists, and other professionals from Ghana, Mali, Senegal, and Nigeria (pending a successful Nigerian democratic transition). The West African participants will spend two and a half weeks at Michigan State University where they will make individual presentations, attend lectures and seminars focused on women’s issues in democratizing societies, and participate in an intensive workshop on using the Internet for resources on women, civic education, and democratization. Then, they will spend four days in Washington, D.C. where they will attend lectures and meet with women’s organizations. The Washington trip will include meetings with USIA staff, as well as American women leaders, women’s rights activists, and other political representatives concerned with women’s democratic organizing.
During the 1999-2000 academic year, the program leaders will visit the West African sites and conduct local training sessions in conjunction with the workshop participants. They also will participate in policy discussions with the West African leaders, scholars, and NGOs. A funding proposal will be submitted to the U.S. Institute of Peace to support additional in-country training sessions, with plans to hold these sessions at the Goree Institute and the facilities at WARC, both located in Dakar (Senegal).
This program is part of the African Internet Connectivity Project undertaken by H-Net and Michigan State University to facilitate the development of Internet resources, training, and networking for higher education in Africa as well as to support political organizing and the promotion of emerging sustainable democracies. This program promises considerable benefit, with a strong multiplier effect, for women’s groups, professional associations, educational organizations, and political leadership in these four countries and throughout Africa. Americans who have professional interests in Africa and women’s rights, and in the structures of West African higher education and research also will benefit from this partnership.
1. Program Rationale and Description
1.1 Program Themes
This proposal seeks to build a two-year training program in electronic
connectivity for West African women’s organizations, leaders, and
supporting scholars and their institutions in the fields of civic
education and democratic participation.
1.2 The Internet and Democracy in Africa
The Internet’s unique ability to make information available quickly,
easily, and on an interactive basis has the potential to encourage civic
participation and democratic governance in new and exciting ways. As the
world’s largest library, the Web offers active citizens and
non-governmental organizations access to a wide range of materials useful
for civic and scholarly education and for practical political application.
The interactive capacity of the Internet can be used to help build sustainable democracy by strengthening exchange of information and ideas among non-governmental groups and grassroots organizations, educators, specialized journalists, NGO and political leaders, and government officials within a country. Equally important, it can facilitate building networks amongst non-governmental organizations within different African countries, and between Africa and the United States. We know from experience that electronic networks can be a first step to facilitate exchange between anglo- and francophone regions within Africa. At the same time, Internet networking can foster cross-cultural awareness and understanding between African and U.S. citizens on such key issue as women’s rights, cultural norms and democratic experiences.
The Internet can be used to enhance civic participation in numerous ways. Courses in civic education can be disseminated. Searches can locate information on current political issues or on similar issues in other countries. Newsgroups and e-mail lists can be used for timely discussion of specific public issues and for formulating plans for action. Organizational web pages can be created to make new sources of information available and to communicate with a broad audience about the organization’s objectives and resources. The Internet can be used by leaders of organizations to consult with colleagues and experts abroad as they face common problems and seek to identify relevant literature and programs to address them.
Because information is a key basis of economic and political power, it is possible to imagine a world in which the gap between information "haves" and "have-nots" is narrowed to a degree inconceivable before the Internet. But the many possible benefits of the Internet for the exercise of democracy depend on democratic distribution of the resources of the Internet itself - both access to computer equipment and the Internet, and skill development in their use.
The physical infrastructure that makes the Internet accessible is increasingly available to users throughout Africa. The United States’ Leland Initiative and similar projects by the European Union and UNESCO have succeeded in establishing national policies conducive to Internet development throughout the continent and in laying the first pipes to bring most African countries on line. Africa is rapidly coming to terms with the new technology and eager to apply it.
With the policies in place to facilitate the development and use of the Internet and the infrastructure necessary for connectivity becoming increasingly available, the next step for African institutions and countries is to develop the human capital necessary to lead their countries onto the Internet. Political leaders throughout Africa understand that extensive training is necessary. They need to be able to see first hand the capacities of the Internet and to develop the expertise needed to be able to converse and direct the technicians who will build the infrastructures in their countries. At this stage, it is thus valuable to bring key leaders to workshops in the United States and to arrange visits to pioneering American educational institutions.
Throughout Africa, there remains a long way to go to acquire sufficient infrastructure to capture the benefits of democratic access to information and communication that the Internet promises. Access to this technology is particularly lacking by grassroots groups and non-governmental organizations that have not been favored with large donor grants. Also, in Africa as elsewhere, women have not worked with the Internet to the same extent as men.
This program, with its focus on African women’s organizations, has targeted a particularly important constituency in terms of democratization and civic participation. Its success will depend on organizations such as higher education institutions and associations agreeing to make their technological infrastructure available to non-government and grassroots organizations that otherwise could not afford access. It also will require sensitivity in training to listen and respond to the priorities for use of the Internet that are determined by the women’s organizations themselves. The program will make available training in a broad range of skills, but will not preempt the choices that these organizations make about the projects to be undertaken by their scarce personnel who are trained in the Internet.
1.3 Program Goals
It is in this context of the immense opportunities offered by the Internet
for democratization and the participation of non-governmental and
grassroots women’s organizations that Michigan State University requests
funding to provide training in the United States to a select group of West
African leaders from women’s organizations during the fall of 1999 and
2000. These workshops will cover:
2. Program Planning and Design
2.1 Who will Participate
We have chosen to focus this program on four West African countries--
Senegal, Ghana, Mali and Nigeria -- in which MSU has long experience. MSU
has had a linkage with the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal
for more than a decade that has facilitated a variety of faculty
exchanges. In addition, it has developed close ties with the new
university at St. Louis, Senegal. MSU faculty and students have had a
long-term experience in Mali (particularly in Agricultural Economics),
symbolized in MSU’s recent awarding of an honorary degree to President
Alpha Konare (May 1998). Faculty of MSU have a long record of research in
Ghana and collaboration with Ghanaian faculty at both the University of
Ghana-Legon and the University at Kumasi. With the University at Legon,
the MSU College of Agriculture is mounting an Internet distance education
project, a linkage and exchange has been proposed for a USIA University
Affiliation Grant, and various other exchanges have developed over the
past five years. In addition, MSU is currently partnering on a proposal to
the Ghanaian government to assist in a drafting a nationwide assessment
plan for Internet needs in education. The inclusion of Nigeria, where MSU
once had strong institutional ties, is pending a successful Nigerian
transition to democratic rule, which currently is planned around elections
early in 1999.
We plan to bring 10 different participants (from the four participating countries) to Internet workshops during September of 1999 and September of 2000. Participants will include a cross-section of key individuals committed to promoting the political representation of women in these countries. In particular, we will seek for women involved in democratic organizing at the NGO or grassroots level and women’s rights specialists who are supportive of these organizations who will use on-line resources to empower women and educate their constituents in on-line access and international exchange. The choices will be made in cooperation with IAD, CODESRIA and WARC, and in full consultation with USIA posts. Women from West Africa who have been visiting scholars at MSU or women who have been in contact with the MSU’s program on Women and International Development also will be consulted.
The criteria for participation will be involvement in democratic organizing, demonstrated basic competence in the existing means of electronic connectivity, and willingness to devote ongoing effort to communication among the general public and women in particular. Where possible, preference will be given to individuals who have not had the benefit of previous international training or exchanges.
Our partner institutions in West Africa are described below:
2.1.1 Institute for African Democracy (IAD):
Initiated by the United Nations Development Program as a regional project,
the Institute for African Democracy is a NGO headquartered in Dakar,
Senegal. IAD, under its director Babacar Sine, is committed to promoting a
democratic culture and strengthening civil society through civic and
popular education, organizing information forums, outreach programs and
training sessions. IAD’s two major projects address the political
empowerment of West African women. The first project aims at enhancing the
participation of women in political life and the process of decision
making in eight West African countries. Aissata De, who received Internet
training at MSU this past summer, manages this project. (H-Net hosts a
website of the project at The second project headed by Michelle Ndiaye is
centered around human rights advocacy, and the training and protection of
journalists. In this project, priority is given to the theme "women, the
media and freedom of speech" and devising strategies for women to enter
the male dominated West African media. Both of these projects can reach an
even greater number of individuals in both rural and urban areas by making
use of e-mail discussion networks and web-based technologies.
2.1.2 Council for the Development of Social Science in Africa
(CODESRIA):
CODESRIA is the leading all-Africa research institute in the social
sciences and has made a major contribution to the elevated quality of much
recent African scholarship across the continent. As an independent
scholarly organization of African social scientists that cuts across
linguistic and regional boundaries, CODESRIA is committed to facilitate
research, promote publishing, and create multiple forums geared toward the
exchange of views and information among African researchers.
CODESRIA has developed a special focus on women’s rights and gender studies through a special women’s workshop led by Professor Penda Mbow of the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop. Our proposed program will build on the liaisons established in this workshop between local women’s organizations and the academics who have particular access to the Internet.
With support from the Ford Foundation and other donors, CODESRIA already has excellent connectivity in email, and members of its staff have participated in the training sessions hosted at MSU in 1997. A collaborative research agreement between CODESRIA and MSU is being developed to create a mutual, active and enduring cooperation between the two institutions. Through this linkage agreement, this CODESRIA-MSU partnership will seek to create thematic research networks that cut across linguistic and regional boundaries and help mend the fragmentation of research on and within Africa.
2.1.3 The West African Research Center (WARC):
The West African Research Center is committed to the advancement of
teaching and research in the region. Headquartered in Dakar, Senegal, it
is the only American overseas research center in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Launched in 1993, with the support of the Senegalese government and
financed initially with funds from the United States Information Agency,
Fulbright, and the Department of Education, WARC is the African extension
of WARA, which is based in the United States and includes individual and
institutional members. MSU is one of the institutional members of WARA.
WARC has created a library, electronic mail capacity, and a variety of services for visiting local scholars and several lecture series. It has received a number of WARA fellows and interns from the U.S. and sent West African fellows for periods of study and interaction in the United States. These scholars and students, who have been chosen on the basis of competitive proposals, have developed associations on both sides of the Atlantic and may provide potential recruits for this program. MSU is in the process of installing a server and six workstations at WARC. This server will provide WARC, IAD, CODESRIA and other scholarly and civic organizations with their own domains, web pages, and email accounts. The laboratory will serve as a training center for all of these organizations.
2.2. Program Design
The program includes two elements: training in the U.S. and follow-up
training workshops in West Africa. The U.S. training will take place at in
the fall of 1999 and 2000 at MSU in East Lansing, Michigan and in
Washington, D.C. Follow-up workshops in West Africa will take place during
the academic 1999-00 year.
2.2.1. Training in the United States
The workshops at MSU will meet daily for two and a half weeks in September
of each year. Participants will divide their time between two important
activities: (a) training in the Internet and (b) discussion of
institutional and policy contexts for development Internet resources in
Africa and the uses of electronic resources to meet the needs of women’s
organizations in civic society.
The content of a workshop for African trainees is not so obvious as it might seem. The West African participants will have less experience in computer technology and the Internet than comparable American women. They will be returning to situations in which the infrastructure is poorly developed, where repair and maintenance skills are more difficult to find. They will become trainers of other users as well as users and consumers for themselves. With this in mind, we must provide them with a broad array of skills and ample opportunity to practice and experiment.
Internet training at MSU
Instruction and demonstration about the Internet will be concentrated between 9 and 12 each morning. We expect to keep all of the trainees together for most sessions, but it may prove useful to divide the group by experience and competency. During the early afternoon hours the trainees will use the computer laboratories to develop their own experience and complete assignments, which will correlate directly with the equipment, networking and training which they will be doing upon their return. Graduate assistants will be available to them during this process.
We anticipate providing theoretical and hands-on instruction in the following:
Part of each afternoon will be devoted to seminars and roundtable discussions about the institutional infrastructure and policy needed to develop full Internet capacity in West Africa and addressing strategies and approaches for using the Internet in civic education and network building within Africa and beyond. In addition to the West African participants, university administrators, representatives from the MSU library and Computer Center, and faculty involved in Distance Education will be invited to attend these sessions. This part of the program will be modeled after the highly stimulating and engaging sessions we held with West African participants in a similar program in the summer of 1998.
Most importantly, afternoon sessions will encourage the participants to conceptualize the Internet and electronic resources as means to an end. We will concentrate on strategies and action plans for putting the resources of the Internet to the task of fostering democratic networks and launching initiatives to increase citizen participation in the emerging West Africa democracies. Each West African participant will give a presentation describing: their work, project and responsibilities; the situations, challenges, and obstacles they face; their current needs and plans for the future. We anticipate that each country team will have the opportunity to assess the current situation of electronic resources in their country, develop an action plan for further development of electronic resources, and begin to plan strategically about how to utilize the Internet for educational and political purposes.
Afternoon sessions could include the following topics:
The participants will spend the last four days in the U.S. in Washington, D.C. Their visit to Washington will be coordinated by Michigan State University’s office on Capitol Hill in conjunction with the congressional offices of several members of the Michigan delegation. Their experience will include discussions with staff of women’s non-governmental organizations and other U.S. women political leaders. An important part of this experience, which draws on our very successful such visits to Washington in previous programs, will be to familiarize the participants with sources of support and contacts in the Washington organizations and agencies. The global reach of the Internet will make it possible for participants to maintain these contacts. There also will be discussions with USIA officials
2.2.2. Follow-up Visit and Training in West Africa
The program staff will remain in close touch with the participants through
the 1999-2000 academic year and beyond through e-mail and the Internet.
This will allow us to help with problem solving in the very open-ended
environments which the participants will face and to learn from their
experience in those settings. In the second year, three of the principal
investigators and consultants on the program will travel to West Africa to
consult with program participants, discuss Internet development with NGOs,
women leaders and/or government officials, assist in developing on-site
training programs, and organize recruitment for the 2000 workshop. We will
assist the participants in the first workshop in making the transition to
training their colleagues at home. The program scheduled for the summer of
2000 will benefit greatly from the insight obtained during the visits in
West Africa.
We plan to conduct follow-up training sessions in each West African sites during the 1999-00 year. The trainees from the workshop of the previous summer will be key participants and planners in these sessions. Some of the participants in the West African sessions may be candidates for the second workshop at MSU.
3. Multiplier Effect and Impacts
The previous MSU Internet Workshops with USIA sponsorship already have had many multiplier effects in West and Southern Africa, and in the U.S. Workshop participants in 1997 and 1998 have linked with each other among the nations of Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Zambia, and South Africa, trading information and experience individually and in project list-servs. The workshops for West African women’s organizations and supporting NGOs, and scholarly and activist organizations (such as IAD and CODESRIA) will build linkage between women’s organizations, their leaders, scholars, and their institutions. Because of the scarcity of Internet access, these linkages are particularly necessary if women community leaders and their organizations are to reap the benefits of connectivity.
By far the greatest potential impact of this program will be in West Africa. The 20 participants will be in a position to play a critical role in using electronic instruments to further teaching, data collection, and research. In addition to their exposure to numerous aspects of the Internet and electronic resources in Washington D.C. and MSU, and the networks that they will have established, we expect that they will remain in close contact with us and that they will become problem solvers and invaluable resources for academic and international communities. In time, these contacts will lead us to others, just as the H-Net community has grown from a small handful of subscribers to tens of thousands.
In addition to positive long-term effects in North America and in West Africa, this program has the potential to have an international impact. The successful completion of this program will result in curricula and models that can be used and improved upon across the world. As the international academic community becomes more and more accustomed to using the Internet, there will be an increasing demand for well-thought-out models for its use in the classroom and as a tool for democratization. With proper on line publicity and proper framing, the lessons we learn in the course of these seminars will become a base on which others can build. This program has the potential to have a significant long-term international impact by demonstrating how apparently resource-poor areas can be enriched with information and linkage with colleagues abroad.
At MSU, this experience will challenge and expand the repertoire of H-Net and provide useful models for training of groups without a strong background in computers and the Internet. We expect it to be an important component of the National Training Center that MSU is creating for communication, teaching, and research on the Internet. An on line site will be established which will provide information about our program and curriculum for similar programs here and abroad. In this way, the pedagogical lessons we learn will be absorbed where they can be useful and improved upon by other bodies engaged in the same kind of efforts. Since this site will be developed by H-Net staff at MSU and by course participants, it will also provide a demonstration of the ways in which the provision of even a minimal level of technical expertise can have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.
We will be reporting on the process and the results of these workshops (and of other activities of H-Net) in several different forums, including H-Net discussion lists and Web-sites, and will be inviting reaction from participants and discussion from the subscribers. The most important impact in the United States may be on the concept and practice of training in connectivity.
4. Support of Diversity
From experience in the MSU Internet Workshops in 1997 and 1998, we know that these workshops build diversity among the African participants and the MSU and H-Net personnel. First, the participants bond with each other across lines of gender, social position, office, and ethnicity from their home countries. This was especially striking in the case of the Africans, Indians, Coloureds, and Whites in the South African delegation, even though this was not without tensions. Second, there was a surprising cross-national linking (e.g. in the 1998 evaluation sessions, the Zambians urged us to work more diligently to deal with the special needs of the francophone participants from Senegal and Ivory Coast). Those links have continued after the workshop experience with each other via the Internet. Some African participants have commented on the value of working both majority and minority Americans in the workshops.
At MSU the training teams have consisted of a mixture of Americans of differing racial backgrounds, differing genders, and differing nationalities, including African trainers. A major foundation officer has described the MSU African Studies Center as the most active affirmative action African program in the nation - both in its personnel and in the range of programs designed for minority (including African American) students in HBCUs and other small colleges across the nation and in study abroad programs in Africa, summer intensive language programs, minority African studies immersion programs, and more. The MSU motto, used by H-Net and all MSU programs, is that "MSU is an affirmative action and equal opportunity institution."
5. Institutional Capacity and Reputation
This proposal brings together the technical expertise of H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences On line and the scholarly resources represented by MSU’s African Studies Center and Women and International Development Program in partnership with the long-term commitment of IAD, CODESRIA, and WARC to women and political participation in West Africa.
5.1 Personnel:
The program will be directed by Professor Mark Kornbluh, Executive
Director of H-Net; Professor Anne Ferguson, Director of the MSU Program of
Women and International Development; Lisa M. Fine, Professor of Women’s
History at MSU; David Robinson, specialist in West African History at MSU;
and David Wiley, Director of the African Studies Center at MSU. Kornbluh,
an international leader in the development of both scholarly and community
networks, oversees the largest international consortium of online networks
and directs national and state-funded projects using the Internet for
teaching and community-building purposes. Ferguson is a leading
anthropologist of African women, rural socio-economics, and fisheries. She
has co-directed a USAID project on democratization in Zambia. Fine, a
pioneering scholar who’s work links women and labor history, has worked
extensively with community organizing groups in Michigan. Robinson, former
President of the African Studies Association, is a University
Distinguished Professor of History and African Studies, is widely regarded
as perhaps the finest scholar of francophone West African history. Wiley,
the incoming President of the African Studies Association, is a scholar
with broad research and teaching experience in Africa - in Kenya, Zambia,
Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Wiley has coordinated USIA University
Affiliation Projects with University of Zimbabwe and Addis Ababa
University; and Robinson a parallel project with Universite Cheikh Anta
Diop (Dakar). Kornbluh, Wiley and Robinson together have directed two
previous citizens exchange projects.
5.2 H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences OnLine:
H-Net will play the central role of technical advisor and partner in this
program. Established in 1993 to facilitate the use of the Internet to
enhance teaching and research, H-Net is funded by MSU as well as a variety
of national sources including the National Endowment of the Humanities.
Comprising over 90 separate networks with a total subscriber base of
85,000 in over 90 countries, H-Net is by far the largest consortium of
scholars and teachers on the Internet. It is also one of the most
thoroughly internationalized. The H-Net community ranges from Japanese- to
German-language networks with international editorial communities. The
H-Net Executive Committee, an elected body, has substantial international
representation. H-Net has always been dedicated to the notion that the
Internet is a place where people-to-people conversations can take place
across and within national boundaries. Our networks strive to let an
international community of scholars work together in ways that are
instructive for all. Since the discussion networks are e-mail based, they
work at the lowest common technical denominator on the Internet, which
makes them as open as possible to participants with all levels of
available financial and technical resources. The networks that evolve in
this atmosphere are in no way top-driven. They permit the participants to
talk, discuss, and let the network community develop its own culture.
African lists that evolve from this program will be African communities,
even if they are hosted at MSU. The content, tone, and direction of the
discussions will result from the needs and interests of the participants,
not from the needs and interests of American sponsors. At the same time,
insofar as those virtual communities choose to open themselves to
international participation, they will represent marvelous opportunities
for scholars to gather and work from their own perspectives. A rich and
varied cultural mix will be created even within a single virtual
community.
Within H-Net there is a rapidly growing focus on Africa, women’s, and gender studies. Harold Marcus, who specializes in Eastern African history, and David Robinson, who specializes in West Africa, have worked with Kornbluh and the African Studies faculty to develop a family of H-Africa networks. These include H-Africa (African Studies), H-AfrLitCin (African Literature and Cinema), H-AfrArts (African Expressive Arts), H-AfrTeach (Teaching African Studies), H-Safrica (South African History and Studies), and H-WestAfrica (West African Studies). H-WestAfrica grew out of our previous Citizen’s Exchange project and is guided by many of that project’s participants. Also in the development are H-AfrPol (African Politics), H-AfrDevelop (African Development), H-AfrJournalism (African journalism), and H-AfrWomen (African Women’s and Gender Studies). H-Net also hosts a wide range of lists devoted to women’s and gender studies including H-Women (Women’s History), H-SAWH (U.S. Southern Women’s History), H-Minerva (Women and War), H-Frauen-L (Early Modern European Women and Gender Studies). Also, H-Net has recently signed a partnership agreement with the African National Congress Archives in South Africa to exploit the potential of the Internet to tell the story of the struggle against apartheid (www.anc-archives.org).
In the course of a three-year international study of multimedia and on-line teaching resources, H-Net has become acutely aware of the pressing need to educate scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and the citizens and NGOs with which they link, in the new pedagogy. We have found that training is an essential component if the information revolution is truly to have a major impact. For H-Net, Africa provides an additional challenge: to develop resources of information and access in an even more open-ended environment in which the structures of higher education and research themselves are called into question. H-Net has thus made the African Internet Connectivity Project a top priority and is eager to continue to build upon our West African experience.
5.3 African Studies Center:
The MSU African Studies Center has been perhaps the leading U.S. African
Language and African Studies Title VI Center in the nation which includes
the largest social science and economics faculty in the Northern
Hemisphere. For more than a decade, the MSU African studies faculty and
graduate students have produced more dissertations on Africa than any
other North American university. The center used a USIA University
Affiliation Grant with the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar
(1987-1991) for a variety of faculty exchanges and has developed close
ties with the new university at St. Louis (Senegal). This reflected the
broad interest in francophone Africa with faculty research projects in
Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Ghana, Sierra Leone,
Liberia, and Benin. In addition, this MSU program developed from a nucleus
of faculty that built the first U.S. style land-grant university in Africa
at the University of Nigeria-Nsukka. The Center’s core faculty, in a wide
variety of disciplines, work throughout West Africa, and it will benefit
significantly from the electronic networks activated by this program.
Because of the strength of the African Studies Center, MSU was a founding
member and maintains its institutional affiliation with the West African
Research Association (WARA).
In cooperation with the Women and International Development Program, the African Studies Center already has established many linkages and partnerships throughout West Africa, which will serve as the basis of this current initiative. For 30 years, the almost 120 African Studies faculty at MSU have been committed to promoting equitable and mutually beneficial partnerships with African universities and institutions, including in Senegal, Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria. The basic principles of our collaborations are that:
1: The partners should share equally in responsibility, power, and linkage resources. In a very unequal world, we have sought a relationship to mirror the kind of society we hope for in the future.
2: The cooperation should produce original research, teaching, and service.
3: We should orient cooperation toward the pressing issues of cultural, economic, social, and political development.
5.4 Women and International Development:
The Women and International Development (WID) program at MSU is recognized
nationally and internationally for its unique program in research,
outreach and service. Established in 1978, MSU-WID cooperates with a broad
spectrum of organizations to link faculty, students and area specialists
interested in processes of global transformation and relations of gender,
class, race and nationality. MSU-WID maintains an active publications
program that includes the WID Working Papers series which publishes
journal-length research based articles, and the WID Forum, a series
featuring short reports describing research projects and development
programs. The program also publishes the WID Bulletin three times a year,
a nationally and internationally recognized resource with information on
up-coming conferences, internship and training opportunities, videos, and
recent articles and books focused on gender and development related
issues. These resources are available on the MSU WID web page. WID also
maintains on its home page a constantly up-dated Internet Resource Guide
with hot links to more than 200 women's organizations worldwide, many of
which deal with women's human rights and political organizing.
5.5 MSU Commitment:
Support for H-Net is part of a larger, long-term MSU commitment to
education and research through the Internet. The university receives an
annual $10 million technology enhancement grant from the state, and it is
using a portion of that to both build an advanced Internet infrastructure
and support content development projects, including H-Net, which are
pioneering new applications of communication technology. MSU supports
Internet connectivity throughout the state of Michigan and in all 99
independent school districts in the state. In addition, MSU under the
leadership of its President, Peter McPherson, has committed itself to
internationalizing its undergraduate curriculum and deepening ties
throughout the world. (MSU already sends more undergraduates abroad to
study than any other university in the country.) With this strong
commitment to building scholarly partnerships throughout the world and to
using Internet resources in this process, MSU is dedicating substantial
resources to the African Internet Connectivity Project.
6. Follow-on Activities
The basic follow-on activities of this program are found in the West African portion of the effort (see above) where MSU and H-Net personnel will conduct follow-up workshops in West Africa. In addition, we shall exchange experience and information via the planned listservs, as has developed among the previous two summer’s participants. As explained above, these workshops will capacitate the H-Net and MSU institutions to be better trainers and better collaborators with our African colleagues.
7. Evaluation Plan
The evaluation of this program will take place in three phases. The first will address the success of the technical sessions at MSU. The second will involve an assessment of the degree to which participants have (or have not ) absorbed lessons and ideas about using this technical knowledge to encourage the growth of democracy and civil society in their own countries. This phase will seek to determine the degree to which the program has been an exercise in civic education and in providing civic education on line. The final phase will assess how this new knowledge has been implemented in Africa and its implications for future, both for our participants and for those who benefit from the training and discussions in which they participate as a result of this grant.
In order to evaluate the success of the technical sessions at MSU, we will follow standard procedures for gauging the effectiveness of skills training. At the beginning of the workshops we shall distribute a questionnaire seeking to establish the entering computer and Internet skill level of our students. At the end, we shall present participants with a questionnaire where they will project what they will be able to do in their home countries and what they learned in. The results from these two questionnaires will be compared in order to judge how much progress the participants have made. The same types of questionnaires will be formulated for those participating in the second workshop and at the same intervals. In addition, we will ask all instructors and others participating in the workshops to respond to a questionnaire about their part in the program and to make suggestions for changes. The results of all these types of information-gathering will be compiled in a central report.
It is of course less simple to test for progress in synthesizing skills with ideas and content. However, since part of the thrust of this application is to allow participants to discuss and project how they will use on line resources to improve participatory democracy in their countries, our questionnaires will address these issues as well. How do participants feel these sessions have improved their understanding of the contributions on line efforts can make to democracy in their countries? What can we do to make sure that the right kinds of resources are available on line for activists, citizens, and administrators alike? In addition to this section of the questionnaire, we will ask participants via e-mail to provide us with a status report six and 12 months from the termination of their participation in the MSU program. This will let us assess how the discussions here have helped encourage the development of new networks and resources in Africa itself. They may indicate how the thinking of our participants about these issues has evolved. These three levels of assessment technical, civic educational, and at the level of implementation will provide a good overall sense for the effects and benefits of our use of the grant money provided under this program.
8. Cost Effectiveness and Cost Sharing
We are asking the USIA to fund the travel and per diem of the West African participants for the two fall workshop periods plus the travel for three members of the leadership team to visit the West African sites in 1999-2000 to conduct training, follow-up, evaluation, adjustment, and recruitment. MSU is investing heavily in this program, providing the vast majority of the staffing and the major instructional component of the workshops. As noted above, MSU is in the process of building a computer laboratory at WARC in Dakar. This project is being undertaken in cooperation with Universite Cheikh Anta Diop and will serve WARC, IAD, and CODESRIA. H-Net is providing mirror sites for all three organizations on its MSU servers and will continue to work with each to develop on-line resources. Similar support will be made available to all community-based NGOs that participate in this project. MSU is committed to locating servers in South Africa and Zambia and hopes to do the same in Mali and Ghana as part of this project. In addition, a separate funding proposal is being prepared for the U.S. Institute of Peace to support additional in-country training sessions in conjunction with this project. We plan to hold these sessions at the Goree Institute in Dakar and the facilities at WARC.
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