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11July2008

SIS internship: The first weeks

Posted by maira under: Uncategorized.

Last week was my first week at SIS, but it feels like its been months. Everyone is so friendly and helpful.  While they’re very serious about their work, they have such great humor about everything.  I’m learning so much about Malaysian politics because they’re always talking about the current state of the government, its corruption and the way in which politicians somehow all get involved in some messy controversy involving affairs, sodomy and murder.

So anyways, what am I doing here? Last week, I finished the first draft of a research paper outlining 6 different child support agencies from various countries. I’m going to present it to the Joint Action Group for Gender Equality in a couple weeks, who will use it to plan and design such an agency in Malaysia. These agencies, while they vary, are mainly supporting and enforcing child support payments from the non-custodial parent and making sure that in cases of domestic abuse, the abuser doesn’t find the spouse who’s receiving the payment. It’s been very discouraging reading agency websites and their statistics because I did not realize so many get away with not paying child support. (I learned that in Japan, 87% of non-custodial parents don’t pay! AND joint custody is illegal there.)

Then I’m supposed to be working on a database for them to input data from their legal interns doing “Court Watch” visits. This is when they go to shariah (Muslim law) courts that are dealing with divorce, domestic abuse, or other family matters, to make sure that the courts are following proper court procedures. As of now, they just have dozens of forms with notes with no way of organizing all of it.  I will probably just use Microsoft Access to make them a quick database for them and teach a couple of them how to make one in the future for any other data-storing project.

I’ve also been doing some IT odds and ends…such as helping Zainah Anwar, the retired executive director of SIS, and an occasional SIS staff member from Boston named Jana, to design and find a good logo for their international conference on Muslim family law in February called GloMo (Global Movement for Women), teaching them the ideas behind file extensions, or how to burn a DVD data CD.  I’m hoping to figure out if I can do a tech training at SIS but I have yet to figure out what skill would be most useful to them.

In a couple weeks, they’re going to put on their first Mobile Legal Clinic, in which their legal interns and staff will be going out to different destinations around the area and provide workshops for Muslim women to learn about their legal rights. I’m also going to be working on creating a new section for their website dedicated to publicizing this workshop.

All in all, it’s been an eclectic series of projects.  This week however, I’m starting an in-depth paper showing empirical evidence for the need of Muslim family laws to improve the status of women in various countries for the sake of their societies as a whole.  I broke up the world into four regions, Africa, Asia, Middle East and the Western Hemisphere, to gather information to prove the benefits of amending current social norms and laws that prevent women from having equal sexual, economic, social, and labor rights as men.  I’m actually pretty excited to be working on this research because I’m hoping to writing my thesis on the impact of Muslim family laws on women when I return to UCSC to finish my undergraduate degree.  It’s only been two weeks so we’ll see what I’ll be working on in upcoming months…

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9July2008

update from kano, nigeria

Posted by scott under: Uncategorized.

Today was our fourth day of website design training with the staff of CITAD, the Centre for Information Technology and Development. It started last Thursday with a not so shocking but certainly annoying occurrence: the diesel generator that powers the office blew out and set on fire. This meant that nearly half of our planned three-hour training had to be run entirely without electricity until a new generator arrived the next day.

This is Kano. With no real infrastructure, every individual home and business is responsible for their own electricity, spending astronomical amounts of money on diesel and generator repairs for what is an entirely unpredictable power supply. Combine this with the open sewers and poverty of the old Kano city viewable from their second story balcony, the CITAD offices might seem at first glance an unlikely place for web design trainings.

But at the end of four days the staff had put together impressive and functional sites made entirely with HTML and CSS. A feat, I reminded our fearless leader Adam Thompson, took weeks for UCSC students to master in our GIIP lab course. Their enthusiasm and thirst for IT knowledge was incredibly motivating and made the classes exciting and enjoyable for all that participated.

The amount of work that CITAD is able to accomplish in the community awe-inspiring. A large computer lab (although only qualifiable as such by Western standards by the sheer amount of monitors in one room) hosts software trainings and exams day in and day out. Outside of the office, the staff makes visits at schools, villages, and mosques, informing individuals and organizations about the importance of computer technology in the economic and political development of their local and national communities. On a wider scale, they observe elections and advocate for better governance and public participation in politics. Their gender officer, Fatima Ibrahim, focuses her efforts on the implications of ICT for women. To accomplish this all in such challenging conditions for over a decade is a testament to their commitment and strength as an organization.

The web design trainings will be followed this week by classes on office networking, managing excel databases, content management systems, and more. All of this with the intention of CITAD staff  repeating the trainings with other civil society organizations in Kano. On Monday, Adam Thompson will return to the states and I will continue working with CITAD to increase their skills and capacity to include ICT in their work. I’m convinced that we learned just as much about teaching technology in Kano as the CITAD staff learned HTML and CSS. There is no doubt that the challenges of these trainings, not limited to just power and language barriers, will continue throughout the summer but I’m confident of the lasting impact this technology can bring to their work and the importance of GIIP’s partnership with organizations like CITAD.

-Scott Reed

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