Qwifi - Vital Information for Marginalized Women

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Bridging the Gender Digital Divide by Open Access and Open Source

Technology is revolutionizing the world by providing tools for entrepreneurship, access to education, as well as life-enhancing information. Yet women increasingly have limited access to technology, resulting in a digital gender divide. Women face a variety of barriers to mobile access, with data costs and illiteracy topping the list. Even if a woman has a device, she may not be able to use it to its full potential.Qwifi can solve this problem.It’s a simple, accessible and cheap technology that can provide free audiovisual content to marginalized populations. Qwifi can be used in any scenario where information and knowledge transfer is required and where parts of the target audience have access to smartphones.

Qwifi Use Cases

Health EducationQwifi comes withAudiopedia, an audio library that contains more than 400 relevant questions and answers about health, nutrition, family planning, child care and more. This equals 12 hours of spoken text. All contents have been developed by experts and most of them have been used in humanitarian work for more than 30 years.Crisis ResponseMore than 200 million people were affected by natural disasters or displaced by conflict and violence in 2014. 50 per cent of refugees are women and girls. When crises strike, gender inequalities worsen. Gender-based violence increases, women are excluded from life-saving services and their limited mobility leads to physical insecurity. Access to healthcare is also limited, increasing mortality and malnutrition rates, particularly for mothers and infants. Under such circumstances, timely and accessible information is crucial for women in order to take care for themselves and their families.Skills TrainingAccess to training is a major constraint among rural people in developing countries. Training outside the formal training system is often the most important source of skills training. Unequal gender relations and traditional gender roles entail specific difficulties for rural girls and women in accessing education and training. Qwifi can provide skills training to the uneducated without limiting them by financial barriers (e.g. training and transportation costs).

Benefits of Qwifi

Open Access and Open SourceQwifi is using open technologies to build a growing, global community of people and organizations that use and share this new approach to close the digital gender divide. The goal is to build a global Qwifi ecosystem where partners create and share contents, concepts and ideas on a common digital platform.FlexibilityQwifi was designed to be a simple, open and modular multi-purpose system. Both hardware and software can be easily expanded to adapt to different scenarios. The complete software can simply be copied on a USB stick in order to adapt to many different scenarios.Accessible HardwareAssembly of the Qwifi device is extremely easy and its hardware can be purchased locally in most countries for USD 30. Maybe you would even like to set up a social enterprise that focuses on the Qwifi product?

Content on a Stick

Qwifi has been designed to run from a simple USB stick. This allows for a maximum content flexibility. By downloading and copying one a Qwifi file to a USB stick you will be up and running in no time. This will enable Qwifi to be set up with other available Open Access content in the future. For example Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Health Phone, Practical Action, career Girls and many more.

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