The use of Ushahidi and Women Web for Gender Based Violence reporting

The whole picture of Ushahidi and Women Web portaltraining at Open Institute. Phnom Penh January 29, 2013 Photo by Open Institute  A training of Ushahidi and Women Web portal was conducted at Open Institute training center, in collaboration with Ministry of Women's Affairs, The National League of Communes/Sangkats and the Cambodian NGO Committee on CEDAW, on 29 January 2013. Participants were staff from various NGOs and Government institutions includes Ministry of Information, Ministry of Women's Affairs, People Health and Development Association (PHD), Banteay Srey, Padek, COMFREL, Peace and Development (PYD), Khmer Women's Cooperation for Development (KWCD), Legal Aid of Cambodia (LAC), Cooperation Committee for Cambodia (CCC), Cambodian Women's Crisis Center (CWCC), WHIAD (Kampot Province), Gender and Development for Cambodia (GAD/C), and Cambodia Legal Education Center (CLEC).
 
In her welcome remarks, Ms. Chim Manavy, Executive Director of Open Institute, highlighted that the main objective of this training is to build up the capacity of the members of the Cambodian NGO-CEDAW, women organizations and relevant institutions who are working in gender based violence to use computers in Khmer and use Ushahidi to research, receive, report, discuss and share information involving gender violence, more effectively.
 
Ms. Chim Manavy continued to emphasize that Ushahidi is a platform that allows information collection, visualization and interactive mapping, facilitating participants' work by allowing them to submit the report and retrieve the information related to gender violation more conveniently. This information is very vital for those working in preventing such violence. She added policy makers and others will find the data generated from this Ushahidi useful to formulate any relevant policy, in order to prevent gender based violence in Cambodia.
 
Speaking to open the training, Mr. Hang Puthea, vice chair of NGO-CEDAW, reiterated the importance of the training and encouraged participants to use and share the knowledge learnt, to others.
 
The one-day training, which is a part of a project operated by Open Institute and Association for Progressive Association (APC), funded by The Swedish Program on ICT for Developing Regions (SPIDER), was divided into two sessions. During the morning session, participants were theoretically taught Gender and ICT for Development, and Gender based Violence. In the afternoon session, the participants practiced logging into the web portal and started using the Ushahidi. There are a number of cases that the participants report on the Ushahidi platform.
 
One of the participants, Mr. Neang Sovann, Education Coordinator from COMFREL, mentioned that the training is very important to him. He is very interested in the information obtained from Ushahidi, since he can use the data to persuade relevant people to work harder to protect women from violence. In addition, Ms. Pen Kunthea, deputy director of the information department from Ministry of Women's Affairs, is very excited with the training since she usually collects information about women's violence from only national and international news; however, by using Ushahidi and the women web portal, she can easily access information. Lay Rattana, a communication officer from PYD, also admired the training. First she learned the new knowledge of what ICT is, secondly she now knows how to use Ushahidi to report on gender based violence. Lastly Ushahidi is a source of data that she can research and use it for work related purposes. She will help disseminate this information to other people she knows. For more information in Khmer please click here...
 
Documentation:
 

1. Agenda of the training
2. Speech of Ms. Chim Manavy
3. About the project
4. Training material on Gender Based Violence
5. Training material on Gender&ICT4Development
6. Training material on Ushahidi