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Session One | Sep 6

SESSION TITLE

Why engage in policy and advocacy?
Advancements made in policy advocacy and the language on gender

About the Mentors

Anriette Esterhuysen

Anriette Esterhuysen was the executive director of APC until March 2017. Prior to joining APC, Anriette was executive director of SANGONeT, an internet service provider and training institution for civil society, labour and community organisations. She was active in the struggle against Apartheid from 1980 onwards. From 1987 to 1992 she did information and communication work in development and human rights organisations in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Anriette, with many others, helped establish email and internet connectivity in Southern Africa. SANGONeT hosted a Fidonet hub that provided universities and non-governmental organisations in, among other places, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, with email links to global networks as part of a collaboration between APC and the United Nations Development Programme. Anriette has served on the African Technical Advisory Committee of the UN's Economic Commission for Africa's African Information Society Initiative and was a member of the United Nations ICT Task Force from 2002 to 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Working Group on Financing Mechanisms, and the Commission on Science and Technology for Development Working Group on Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Improvements. She was a member of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group of the Internet Governance Forum from 2012 to 2014.

Anriette was one of five finalists for IT Personality of the Year in South Africa in 2012, an award which recognises a person who has made an outstanding impact on the South African ICT industry. She was the only female and only civil society finalist. She was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame as a Global Connecter in 2013. Currently Anriette is a member of the Global Commission on Internet Governance and the Council of the NETmundial Initiative. She has published extensively on ICTs for development and social justice. She holds a BA in social sciences and postgraduate qualifications in history of music and information sciences from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Adriana Labardini Inzunza

Adriana Labardini Inzunza obtained her law degree cum laude from Escuela Libre de Derecho in Mexico City in 1987 and her master’s degree (LLM) from Columbia University in New York, on a Fulbright scholar in 1991. For four and a half years she served as Commissioner at the Federal Institute of Telecommunications (IFT), the Mexican independent regulatory body and competition authority for telecommunications and broadcasting industries. Currently an independent public interest lawyer and consumer rights expert, is collaborating with Rhizomatica promoting and advocating for sustainable, self-managed community networks to bridge the digital divide, promote rural and indigenous connectivity and media. She is also a founder of Conectadas a network of women in the ICT industries working for gender equality in Mexico.


ABOUT THE SESSION

This session is oriented to discuss perspectives of what advocacy, policy, policy advocacy are and why advocacy and policy advocacy around internet issues and a gender lens are important. It also aims to share experiences of engagement in advocacy.

In this session you can expect to leave the room with the below takeaways:

  • Deconstructing policy spaces and their history and the reason behind our engagement
  • Highlighting the impact of women’s participation in policy spaces
  • Sharing the strategic areas of policy advocacy for gender and ICTs



SESSION PLAN

ABOUT THE SESSION 

This session intends to convey to mentees the importance of advocacy and policy as tools to achieve a specific goal or set of goals that are important to the communities. Such goals, in the case of CN I may be the effective access and enjoyment of certain rights such as freedom of expression, access to information, education and healthcare, among others, on a universal, affordable and meaningful basis. What is policy and policy implementation and assessment; what is advocacy and how they  are different from each other but interconnected and relevant in the pursuit of equality, social justice, inclusion, sustainability,  will be the center of our session. Why is implementation, KPIs, evaluation and adjustments as important as policy for change? 

How to mainstream gender and diversity in the design of policy and also in advocacy strategies will be part of the discussion as well. 


SESSION STRUCTURE

Part A: Introductions - 30 minutes

  1. Overview of the programme - AE
  2. Getting to know  your mentors -  ALI and AE
  3. Participant introductions: Mentees post ONE ISSUE they find particularly confusing or intimidating about policy and policy advocacy in the meeting chat and then repeat it verbally as they briefly introduce themselves stating their NAME, ORGANISATION AND WHERE THEY LIVE (max 1 minute each) 

Part B: What is policy and regulation? - 30 minutes

  1. What is policy? The policy cycle and policy approaches. Voices, foundations and allies and the role of  gendered research - ALI (15 minutes) 
  2. Open discussion (15 minutes) 

Part C: Policy advocacy - Anriette - 30 minutes

  1. What is advocacy and why it matters for CN champions? Integrating gender and using evidence-based policy approaches to learn, build partnership, and achieve results. (10 minutes)
  2. Group exercise - building our own advocacy strategies (20 minutes)

Part D - 10 minutes -  Open discussion and reflections


SESSION PRESENTATION


LEARNING EXPECTATIONS
A survey was shared with participants to determine the expectations of the session.

RESOURCES  

The APC ICT Policy Handbook
https://www.apc.org/en/pubs/books/apc-ict-policy-handbook-second-edition

Library for the session 
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13ehaN39iWnknIn8i1RhaQayji02Opd9v?usp=sharing






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