MP3 Players: A Tool for Information Access for Ugandan Women

Posted on May 14, 2010 by Carol Erickson

In rural Uganda, only ten percent of women have access to radios. Women, unlike men, can be perceived as lazy if they listen to radio programs even when they are on such practical topics as agricultural techniques. 

So Deborah Naybor founded Both Your Hands in order to provide free, recycled MP3 players to women, allowing them to learn from programs on planting strategies, weed reduction, HIV/AIDS, prevention of domestic violence, childcare, and any other topics they request, while doing their daily work. Naybor's project, “Co-op Audio: MP3 Education for Rural Women,” is one of 258 entries in the Women | Tools | Technology: Building Opportunities & Economic Power Challenge. 

Naybor got the idea for using MP3 players in her church’s basement, while selling crafts from African women’s groups to make money for them. At the crafts fair, she noticed that every teen entering the church was listening to music on an MP3 player. 

Knowing that teens wanted to upgrade frequently to the newest cutting-edge model, she asked one teen what he did with his old MP3s. The answer: “I throw it away or give it to my little sister.” 

The free, recycled MP3 players are donated from Naybor’s community, and can be charged by solar or hand cranked chargers. In partnership with Kampala International University in Uganda, students will record programs for the MP3 players in Luganda, the national indigenous language.
 
Women’s groups will design other programs that women desire and act as distribution agents. Providing audio programs is a way that women can learn in rural Uganda where the literacy rates hover around 15 percent.
 
Before she founded Both Your Hands, Naybor was a small business owner who numerous awards for her success in business, including "an invitation to visit Africa to talk to other women about overcoming obstacles." she said. "Once I traveled there, I was hooked.”
 
Throughout Africa, Naybor saw that women hungered for information about how to run successful businesses. She created Both Your Hands as a non-profit organization that connects caring communities with poor villages to create self sufficiency and pride in achievement.  
 
Naybor now is pursuing 70 projects in 15 countries that make a holistic commitment to an entire community, working to find solutions that address poverty via health, agriculture, and access to information. Her desire to find these kinds of solutions to poverty led her to enroll in a doctoral program in global gender studies at the University of Buffalo.
 
“My work with MP3s will launch this July and will focus on two rural villages in western Uganda, where women are faced with time poverty and lack of land use rights," she said. "Women work long days, but have difficulty owning or maintaining land.  
 
"This drastically reduces their ability to earn an income. We are going to create a ten-acre community garden for women to plant, and to see how having access to land changes the way they use their time and ability to earn money. But they also need information in order to successfully cultivate this land, and that was not coming from radio or reading.”
 
Naybor says the most important thing she has learned about social innovation is that any project must be driven by the people who benefit. Her work this summer will start with 30 women, and then expand throughout a district of women’s groups in Uganda, based on their feedback. 
 
Naybor’s deep commitment to improving the lives of women around the world combines her business and academic acumen, and her belief in sharing information. “I’m never against someone else taking our communities’ ideas and lessons learned, and taking it to the next level,” she said.
 
 
 

 

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Comments

Oloufounmi Koucoi profile img
Sun, 07/25/2010 - 16:14
Oloufounmi Koucoi

Hello,

How do you select changemakers? This is a bad initiative that at long run will fail and do harm. Africa does not need the same development process as the U.S., Europe or any other so called developed Country. Do you even observe Africa? Do you take your time to know the culture, the society, how things work? Or you just go to Africa and say, hey you need MP3 player to perform well. MP3? no no no stop that! Africa was a self-sufficient and sustainable continent before the Europeans messed everything up. And now more than ever we want it to return to its sustainability. How do you process that in your mind? giving an MP3 to farmers in Africa. Bad bad bad move, instead organize training's and increase their knowledge of their different seasons, increase their knowledge of weeds and composting. Help them differentiate pesticide and its impact on health. Educate them about nutrition, healthy food, about hygiene. Don't provide MP3.
And you don't need to show a picture of yourself among those kids showing that you are saving they life (old fashion). if you are helping Uganda, it is your own will nobody asks you to do so. It is insulting for us that you present yourself as a savior. Everybody wants a little bit of dignity and we do too.

Tue, 01/04/2011 - 15:11

I was very interested in your comments about the MP3 players.If the people have no access to training courses what alternative is there for them,books maybe? In Australia (that's where I am)we have great books on organic farming,the climate is a bit different maybe but it's all adaptable.
I've worked with African refugees in Australia for years and I have come to love and respect them.
I believe that education is the only way out of poverty and I am providing education for orphans and women in Uganda but I am always concerned about the culture gap that many people seem to make mistakes with.Coming in and doing things that aren't good for the people.I'm not doing this to make myself look good but simply beause I love children and I understand what it is to struggle as a mother (been there done that!)
God Bless
Mary Louise Mackie
Tazamis@hotmail.com