Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Tostan's Jokko Initiative highlighted in The Daily Beast article

Amongst other topics, the Women in the World event held this past weekend discussed the use of powerful new technologies to change the fate of women in developing countries. A few days prior the event, The Daily Beast mentioned ten technologies in particular that have had a successful impact on women’s lives. One of the technologies highlighted was Tostan’s Jokko Initiative, a program that uses text-messages to create a social and educational network, and that has helped communities to further discuss the abandonment of female genital cutting (FGC) and child/forced marriage.

Here is a paragraph of the article “Technologies That Empower Women” by Tom Watson:

10. Connected Communities
When remote villages are interconnected, cultural biases against women can change rapidly. Take the Jokko Initiative in Senegal, named for the word that means "communication" in Wolof, Senegal’s national language. Jokko is a joint project of UNICEF and Tostan, an NGO that has led the movement to abandon female genital-cutting and forced child marriage. The program uses a text message-based social-networking platform to more rapidly "train the trainers," local volunteers who go village to village talking to their peers about “democracy, human rights, problem-solving, hygiene and health, literacy, math, and management," according to Tostan. The result? Less female genital-cutting and child marriage.

To read the full article on The Daily Beast, click here.

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