After twenty years of empowering the communities at the margins in India, DEF has reached a new milestone with our partnership with CWE in Kenya. This week on TypeRight, our team gets back with updates from Kenya:

In 2017, two Kenyan women who were working on their PhD decided to take their academic work on the social impact of tech a step further - and that was how the Centre for Women Empowerment in Technology (CWE-Tech) was founded.

CWE-Tecj works closely with women, attempting to enhance women's productivity using tech and create new socio-economic opportunities for women.

Working in four regions of Kenya -Nairobi, Murang’a, Homabay, and Migori - CWE trains women on using tech, trains and mentors them, and tries to acquire and provide necessary ICT equipment.

This is where our work at DEF aligns closely with CWE-Tech's in Kenya.

Last week, members of our research and communications team, Saurabh and Jenny, were in Kenya for a conference on the intersectionalities of Digital Access and Gender Justice resulting in the gendered digital divide. The WACC is an international NGO that has been advocating for full access to information and communication, and open and diverse media since 1968. DEF is a project partner with the WACC.

But our team did not stop at the conference in Nairobi, Kenya's capital city. They travelled to Murang'a County in rural Kenya.

At Murang'a County, the team connected with CWE-Tech, who work on the ground to provide Digital Literacy and access, mostly to women.

We enabled them with some of our tools that our SoochanaPreneurs in India use - this will upskill the members part of CWE-Tech's team, and upgrade their digital footprint on the ground.

At DEF, we are proud to extend our work across our previously limited areas and partner with other organizations that seek to connect people at the margins. Our partnership initiative in Kenya comes from the two decade-long experience we have in helping bring access to communities in India that do not have Internet.

Here, our newsletter covers in detail our latest updates from Kashmir, Ziro Valley, Assam, and other areas across the country:

Meanwhile, also take a look at the Digital Citizen Summit we are co-hosting with CDPP at T-Hub with the generous support of the Government of Telangana, this November in Hyderabad:

In Other News

Some of the most important news of the week comes from the parliament, where several pieces of legislation have been passed and introduced during the monsoon session, without much debate. One of them is the Personal Data Protection Bill, which although we had covered earlier in another chapter of TypeRight, has gone through so much changes that it needs another article to explain. This piece in the Hindu sums up the issues succinctly:

The dangers in the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill

The data protection law should not suffer from the infirmities that the previous draft had and safeguards peoples’ fundamental rights

thehindu.com

In Andhra, we see a group of scammers who have forged signatures of senior officers and made money in the process:

Scammers in AP CMO busted; 5 made money forging IAS officers’ digital signatures

Police identified Srinu as the prime accused in this case who used to work for Officer Revu Muthyala Raju as a junior employee

newsmeter.in

Last week also saw a continued round of violence in several parts of North India, continuous from the community-targetted mob lynchings that preceded for the past couple of years. This article looks at why the state response has been cold:

This piece in the Financial Express takes a look at why having a GST on online gaming could not be the best way forward for Digital India.

We wish our readers a happy Independence Day, see you next week!