Updating Gender Dynamics in Digital Spaces in Kenya

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    Digitalization is fuelling expectactions to substantially advance sustainable development, including for the most vulnerable. However, techno-optimism tends to eclipse intersectional axes of discrimination and privilege that underpin the global digital gender divide. Ensuring inclusiveness of digital development pathways requires concerted efforts to provide equal acess and opportunities for women and girls to engage with, create and lead the digital world.

    The objective of UPDATE is to assess, through a feminist lens and by way of an intersectional gender approach, the impact digital technologies have on sustainable and equitable development. By building digital resilience UPDATE will open up empowering pathways for women and girls to access, use and design digital spaces.

    UPDATE will analyse how digital innovations reconstruct working relations in three dimensions:

    1. thresholds to jobs in formal and informal settings,
    2. facilitation for workers to organize
    3. potentials for workers to influence practices and policies that govern working environments - including unpaid care work. These will be scrutinised in specific use cases from platform work in Kenya.

    Drawing on a mixed-methods transdisciplinary approach, UPDATE draws upon an ethno design process that engages researchers, civil society partners and stakeholder communities to co-create and iterate solution-oriented responses to the identified use-case challenges. Live digital pilots will conclude the process accompanied by user-designed proposals for scaling.