- Rising Voices Microgrants 2013 - https://rising.globalvoices.org/microgrants2013 -

Philippines: Barefoot Bloggers For the World

· Rising Voices

Categories: Philippines, Women's Rights, Blogs, Digital Photography, Social Networking

Barefoot is a status symbol of farmers and other grassroot groups in the Philippines. These sectors are underrepresented and unheard online. This project aims to train farmer women how to use and maximize the internet and provide them boundless and borderless access to information and communication by establishing net hubs in the far-flung barangays, in such way they can broaden their knowledge and freely share ideas and aspirations to the world

Topical focus:

Women's Rights [1]

Country:

Philippines [2]

What locality or neighborhood will your project focus on?

Dagohoy, Antequera and Trinidad

Describe the specific community with whom you will be working.

Farmers play the vital role in agriculture, the backbone of the country’s economy. Half of them are women whose contributions are rarely recognized and aspirations not heard. Due to poverty, majority of farmer women are deprived of education and denied access to information and this situation worsen the level of deprivation and poverty among them. We want to work with them to break barriers and change this.

What kinds of news, stories and other content will be created?

We aspire to establish a portal run by and for poor farmer women to provide a boundless and borderless “library” of information and “school” of women’s rights; at the same time a venue of gender-fair of ideas among poor farmer women and their communities with the rest of the people all over the world.

What technologies and digital tools do you plan to use in the trainings?

Blogs [3], Digital Photography [4], Social Networking [5]

Describe the connections that you or your organization have already established that will contribute to the success of the project.

We have a strong partnership with SABAKAN, a provincial alliance of poor farmer women organizations and SABAKAN already identified these communities we want to conduct our trainings and establish our internet hubs.

How many participants do you think will be involved in your project?

We will train 75 to 100 women farmers in 3 to 4 far-flung barangays. These women will run and manage the portal and hubs that is established by this project. They are the direct beneficiaries as the hubs serve the whole community and the neighboring barangays. A certain affordable service fee will be collected (as donations) to maintain the electricity and internet service fee while the organizations will work out to the local government units

Besides the microgrant funding, what other resources and support are you seeking for your project to ensure its success?

We can provide IT expertise. We have established friendship and network with Communication Engineering students and graduates who volunteered to train farmer women of the technology. We can provide venue for trainings and collect resources to add the expenses for trainings.

Contact name

Maria Ira Pamat

Organization

Women's Development Center, Inc.

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