IGF 2024 Lightning Talk #38 Critical Digital Literacy: Learnings from rural India

    Digital Empowerment Foundation
    Osama Manzar, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Civil Society, South Asia
    Jenny Sulfath, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Civil Society, South Asia
    Akanksha Ahluwalia, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Civil Society, South Asia

    Speakers

    Jenny Sulfath

    Onsite Moderator

    Osama Manzar

    Rapporteur

    Akanksha Ahluwalia

    SDGs

    5.b
    10.2
    10.3
    16.10


    Targets: The proposed session directly is addressing SDG 5b which is enhancing the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women. The lightening talk will discuss how two component of a program- digital literacy and critical digital literacy contribute to developing women's leadership in the community which impacts the over all confidence of women in their community. This is also further connected to SDG 10.2 and 10.3 which aims to reduce political, social and economic inequality. The talk discusses how digital literacy can create a level playing field for social inequality. SDG 16.10 that ensures public access to information is also closely linked to the session, which looks at women's access to information as an important component of development. It looks at how access to information is mediated by gendered practices and advocate for active measures to eliminate it.

    Format

    The session will begin with the moderator's introduction about the context in which the need for a critical digital literacy module emerged and an overview of the rural digital landscape of India in last 20 years. The speaker will get into the details of the particular project and the learnings. After that five minutes will be the screening of pre-recorded videos of the participants of the projects from ground, followed by an interaction with online and offline audience.

    Duration (minutes)
    30
    Description

    Rural India has been increasingly falling victim to the pervasive misinformation disinformation campaigns and influence operations that target people who do not have the skills to fact-check accurately. While several initiatives in India fact-check and expose these coordinated misinformation campaigns, the initiative's beneficiaries remain an educated urban population. Further, the technology-oriented tools for fact-checking and learning often lack an approach grounded in rural realities where majority of the women are systematically excluded from access to technology. In this session, we discuss Digital Empowerment Foundation's program that trained 480 rural women in digital literacy and critical digital literacy in it's first phase. The lightening talk will discuss how this initiative is taking a different approach to tackling online harms which is embedded in the caste-gender realities of rural India. The talk will discuss how in rural India, misinformation and disinformation is a continuation of the existing gender narratives, norms and dogmas. It will also discuss how the internalised gendered perceptions about the self and body often create a local information landscape that act as a foundation to misinformation and disinformation online. The discussion will also demonstrate how creative ways of project implementation addressed these peculiar issues and what were the challenges and learning from the field. Link to the modules:

    The video case storied from the participants will ensure that the voices from rural India is also represented in the room. A mobile phone will be connected to the Zoom link so that, audience in the room is also connected to some of the online audience. When there is Q&A, the person with the mobile phone will move around and also record it and live stream it simultaneously. We will also distribute a handout (both online and offline) about the issues that are being discussed to clearly communicate the content of the discussion.