IICD and Innovation

International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD)

The IICD or International Institute for Communication and Development is a development organisation that focuses on integrating ICT into sectors like education, healthcare and agriculture. They submitted a request to the PSO Innovatiefonds for a project with three organisations that work on the combination of gender and ICT.

Deem Vermeulen is IICD's International Programme team leader. He explains why gender in ICT is innovative. ‘The project proposal is innovative to us, the IICD. It might not be to everyone else, though. We've had quite a few internal discussions in our organisation on whether women can gain more of a voice through access to ICT. ICT tools are primarily used by men. How to provide women with more access to information using ICT is a problem that interests us. One of the questions that crops up in connection with this is how to measure progress in this field.'

What sort of results does IICD expect? Deem: ‘Our request pertains to three countries: Zambia, Bolivia and Ecuador, where we will be cooperating with three types of partner. This process has only just begun, but after two years we hope that both our partners and the IICD will have learned a great deal. Such as, what gender entails for our projects and how we can reflect on that systematically. The process focuses on the reinforcement of the position of women and information exchange. We will, for example, be organising a cross country learning event to discuss this with one another.'

How did PSO's supervision benefit IICD? ‘Up until recently, we were much more focused on the results for end users than on the results for our partners, and PSO pointed this out to us. Thanks to the way in which PSO works, you become more conscious of the points the organisation can improve. Such as, reflecting on gender's influence on the things we do. We are a learning organisation and try to incorporate these points. In cooperation with our partners we will attempt to raise the visibility of this problem and increase knowledge about it in this innovation project,' says Deem.