“When Can We Start?”: A Community Health Worker’s Perspective on ICTs for Gender Equity in Rural Haiti
In March, the United Nations (UN) held the 2018 Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), focusing on “challenges and opportunities in achieving gender equality and the empowerment of rural women and girls.” More specifically, the CSW highlighted how participation in and access to media and information and communication technologies (ICTs) may facilitate equity and capacity-building for those whose livelihoods and localities are unique to their peers in cities and suburbs. The theme came on the heels of growing concerns in international development for amplifying the voices of marginalized women and girls as well as #metoo and #niunamenos, now viral social media hashtags on experiences of gender-based violence and harassment.
While the phenomena may seem disparate, Footage has been working at their intersections since 2014. The nonprofit engages young women as co-creators and users of ICTs (specifically, mobile phone applications) as tools for producing grassroots media and dialogue on their identities and lived experiences, particularly the violences and inequities they face. Thus far, Footage has reached and connected young women in urban areas and refugee camps globally.
Last year, in rural Haiti, I met with a community health worker — a young woman named Roseline (her name has been changed). I spoke with her to learn about young women in her community and how such programming may be contextualized to support others living in similar regions of her country, a place of profound resilience and self-determination, as well as simultaneous foreign aid and human rights violations.
Roseline provides health education, health advocacy, prenatal care, and primary care, while liaising between her community and an international public health nonprofit. Shortly into our conversation, I saw how she also serves as an informal confidant and mediator for women and girls, someone trusted and supportive on matters of physical, psychological, and financial abuse, education and employment, and reproductive rights. Roseline performs her work with astute observation of and concern for their well-being. She also taught me about Ministre de Femmes, a collective of women in Haiti that organizes to defend the rights and safety of women and girls. Her local knowledge and experiences relayed how across the country, networks are operating for women and by women. Her insights conveyed that initiatives focused on connection, agency, and dialogue may further improve quality of life for young women in rural Haiti by mitigating the isolating effects of violence and inequity.
She explained that while schools and churches teach about healthy relationships, silence continues to surround the domestic abuse of women and girls. Victims commonly fear legal repercussions for the men in their lives if they voice experiences of mistreatment. However, as demonstrated by Roseline’s role in her community, access to trusted individuals to disclose experiences can lead women and girls to seek advocacy and support.
Roseline also shared that she believes addressing the abuse of women and girls means addressing the poverty they face, equipping them with entrepreneurial resources and skills. According to her, women and girls in her community have more access to education and employment than in previous years. However, she is troubled by the frequency by which young women’s education and employment are entirely forfeited for marital and familial duties. Upon the conclusion of our conversation, she reiterated her deep concern for the ways young women are charged with sole child-rearing responsibilities, especially when fathers neglect paternity.
The international development community has contributed to the types of incidences described by Roseline. In late 2017, news broke of paternity and child support claims filed by Haitian women and girls against UN peacekeepers. While the UN has a zero tolerance policy on sexual exploitation of country residents by peacekeepers, women and girls had bravely come forward with stories of the policy being disregarded and of children being abandoned. This was not the first time the UN had been implicated in abuses of power in respect to women and children in Haiti. The UN has since made changes to its mission in the country.
Coupled with Roseline’s reflections, exploitation in Haiti raises the issue of why the international development community must prioritize the voices, rights, dignity, and safety of women and girls. Initiatives must be grounded in local activism, bolstering the ways women already support one another and, with more resources, wish to support one another. To do otherwise risks initiating or perpetuating gender-based violences and inequities. As the CSW and other humanitarian initiatives advance these conversations, the question becomes, how?
ICTs themselves are weighted with exclusions and inequities. For example, while mobile technology is accessible for women and girls in Roseline’s community, she said they commonly do not own their own phones. Rather, men may possess cell phones that are shared with them. And, Roseline believes that if women and girls had increased, autonomous access to mobile technology, they would communicate abuse with one another and receive greater support.
The work of Footage has revealed that when designed for young women, by young women, technology’s limits and conventions are challenged. ICTs become educational and dialogic tools that connect young women around the barriers they face and potential they possess. Designing technology and creating media is both a cultivation and expression of agency and leadership, especially when grounded in one’s lived experiences and local knowledge. Indeed, Roseline shared that from her perspective, young women in her community wish to lessen their isolation and connect with their peers, both locally and globally.
What might other young women throughout rural Haiti share if provided the localized means, safe spaces, and trusted individuals like Roseline?
She asks, “When can we start?”
