Using Ushahidi and Women Web Portal for Gender Based Violence Reporting

Ms. Chim Manavy welcomed participant to the training at Open InstituteA training of Ushaidi and Women Web portal was conducted at Open Institute training center, in collaboration with Ministry of Women's Affairs and The National League of Commune/Sangkat and the Cambodian NGO Committee on CEDAW, on 30 January 2013. There were 15 participants from various non-governmental organization includes NGO Education Partnership (NEP), Cambodian Defenders Project (CDP), Community Development Organization (CODO), Conservation and Development on Cambodia (CDCAM), Cambodian Women for Peace and Development (CWPD), Cambodia Center for the Protection of Children's Rights (CCPCR), NGO Forum, Coordination of Action Research on AIDS and Mobility (CARAM), KHEMARA, Committee to Promote Women in Politics (CPWP), Girl Guides Association of Cambodia (GGAC), Youth Council of Cambodia (YCC), Center for Social Development (CSD), Khmer Youth Association (KYA) and Neutral and Impartial Committee for Free and Fair Election in Cambodia (NICFEC).
 
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.
 
Ms. Kasumi addressed to the participants in the opening speech at Open Institute Phnom Penh 30 January, 2013 Picture: Open InstituteSpeaking to open the training, Ms. Kasumi, Vice Chairperson of the board of directors of the Open Institute and an adviser to Ministry of Women's Affairs, noticed the success of Open Institute in working related to information communication technology and women. She continued highlighting the importance of information technology, especially internet. She added that Internet was vital for both women and men, whether being a victim from gender based violence or not. Internet could give us information and data, and the victim also found it easy to access to Internet to report rather than to meet police or commune chief. As mentioned, Internet, referring to Ushahidi and Women Web portal, was also important to the policy makers who can access to data and prioritize the area to work against gender based violence in Cambodia.
 
The one-day training, which is a part of a project operated by Open Institution and Association for Progressive Association, 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 have learned to report on the Ushahidi platform.
 
Mr. Yin Pero, a participant working as Program Assistant at CCPCR, was very interested in the training. Ushahidi was very new to him. He was excited to gain this new knowledge; however, he concerned that this Ushahidi was probably difficult to share with people in the community due to the knowledge of information technology was very limited to the local people. Mr. Lek Chandy suggested Open Institute train this Ushahidi to other partners and non-partner organizations since it is very useful to protect gender based violence. Mr. Ke Samrech was also delighted to have attended the training. He said Ushahidi was very important tool for people to submit the violence report.
 
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