Women

The main goal of the Women's Empowerment for Social Change Program is to promote gender equality in a society in which women can exercise their rights in a balanced way and can build competence to become self-sufficient, with improved women's participation in social, economic and political life.

To support the goal, the Women's Program implements four main program activities that include the Women's web portal, Information and Communication Technologies - ICT - training, Women's Forum and Gender and ICT research. The program activities are well interrelated in order to lobby for regulations and policies that are supportive of women equality, to provide information about women's issues to women and women's organizations, and to promote synergies among organizations working with women, and Information and Communication Technologies - ICT - as a skill that empowers women.

The Women's Program is implemented under a clear pressing needs of:

• Having a centralized place where it is easy to find information in Khmer that is necessary to women's organizations or to any Cambodian women interested on asserting their rights, including updated information on what each Cambodian organization working on women's issues is doing.
• Tools for facilitating communication among organizations which work on women's issues, ensuring that this communication (in Khmer) adds to the pool on information that is already being offered, producing useful discussion and synergies between organizations.
• Skills for sharing information, discussing and coordinating through electronic means.
• Awareness on how ICT can be used to empower women in general and to increase the impact of existing programs of women's organizations.

Target Groups:

The target groups of the program are women's organizations, female commune council members and government officials, female and male representatives from government and non-governmental institutions those works related to women's issues, female teachers and students, and young women.

1. The Women's Web Portal, http://women.open.org.kh

The Women's Web Portal bridges information gap by making available and easily accessible nationwide information from many local media and information sources. Further than that, this portal also severs as a platform for open discussion and expression of opinions related to gender and social development.

At the moment, there are more than 2000 articles available on the portal which covers a wide ranges of gender and development related issues. To name a few, those articles include economy and development, laws related news, health, rape, domestic violence, social security, information technology, elections, human trafficking, editorials, gender, education, capacity building, talent of women and men, and so on. The articles on the Women's portal are regularly updated.

Functioning as a communication platform, the portal provides three possible means of communication: mailing list, online forum, and web blog. To date, the gender mailing list, gender@lists.open.org.kh, has more than 400 members and 1000 discussion postings. The online forum has more than 20 discussed topics, while the web blog has around 40 topics.

2. Women's Forum

The objective of the Forum is to facilitate and animate electronic and direct discussion between women's organizations and other concerned institutions in order to create the largest possible amount of synergies and sharing of information among them.

A series of forum are organized 6 times per year to discuss important and emerging issues related to women and social development. So far, we successfully organized 5 women's forums which attended by 200 representatives from NGOs, government institutions, secretariat of senate, and media agencies. Furthermore, we also organized a seminar to publish the findings and recommendations from the Women's forums to relevant ministries, senate, NGOs, media agencies and public.

3. ICT/Computer Training

The ICT training aims at promoting synergies among organizations working with women, and ICT as a skill that empowers women. The training course covers Khmer UNICODE, OpenOffice application, Internet and Email. So far, we conducted a total number of 11 trainings of which 6 trainings were in Phnom Penh and 5 trainings were in different provinces. The trainings were attended by staff of NGOs, government's offices, Senate, Royal Palace, commune council members, court offices, companies and universities. The total number of participants of all trainings were 167, 79 were women and 88 were men.

4. Gender and ICT Research

The Gender and ICT research will be carried out to explore opportunities and obstacles of women in accessing to ICT. The research's findings and recommendations will be then distributed and submitted to women's organizations and government for policy formulation and further actions.

Contact Us

If you are interested in getting to know more about the Women's Program, you can contact us at:

- by email: women@open.org.kh
- by phone: 023 224821

You can also visit the Women's Web Portal for more information about the program, training, forum, editorial meeting, related publications and future plan at http://women.open.org.kh