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Ada 16: Emerging Gender, Media and Technology Scholarship in
Africa: Opportunities and Conundrums in African Women’s
Navigating Digital Media
Ada 16
Emerging Gender, Media and Technology Scholarship in Africa:
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Digital Media
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Emerging Gender, Media and Technology Scholarship in Africa: Opportunities
and Conundrums in African Women’s Navigating Digital Media
Audrey Gadzekpo, Paula Gardner, H. Leslie Steeves
Over the past decade and earlier, much of the academic and grey literature has painted an optimistic picture of
rapidly increasing access and growth of digital technologies in Africa. Industry statistics put internet penetration
in Africa close to 40 percent and growing, even though the continent still lags behind the world average of
Internet users (Internet World Statistics, June 2019). Some estimates predict that by 2025 the sub-continent will
add 167 million mobile subscribers to its existing 456 million (GSMA Report, 2019). Mobile devices, especially,
have assumed centrality in the lives of ordinary people and provide prospects for Africa to leapfrog into the
modern digital world. Smart phones are enabling millions of Africans to share news and information more easily
and to tap into all kinds of essential services, much like elsewhere in the world.
Scholars have attempted to track and analyse these developments by directing attention to the multi-faceted
ways in which digital media technologies are being appropriated and how they are impacting people and
institutions. The bulk of the emerging literature confirms that digitization is creating unprecedented
opportunities for Africans to network locally and globally, influencing their daily interactions on personal as
well as formal levels and enhancing their ability to access a wide range of services – from health, to education,
banking, markets, and entertainment (Mabweazara, 2015; Nyamjoh & Brudvig, 2016; Willems & Mano, 2016).
The literature also shows that, although transformative in many ways, the digital landscape is not egalitarian;
rather it is marked by marginality and privilege and reflective of deepening divides among different
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demographic groups (Willems & Mano, 2016; Nyamjoh & Brudvig, 2016). This status quo invites academic
attention that focuses more critically on the multiple intersectionalities of digital encounters occurring at the
macro, micro and meso levels of society. We need to deepen understandings of how different users experience
media and information technologies. As new forms of digital devices emerge, questions of how factors such as
gender, sexuality, socio-economic status, livelihoods, locations, religion, age, etc. determine access and
consumption remain pivotal.
While the corpus of studies on gender and digital technology is growing, much of the research remains
Eurocentric. Thus, there are still striking gaps in our knowledge regarding how non-Western women, particularly
from the Global South, appropriate and negotiate digital technologies in meaningful ways. Feminist research on
media technologies have often revealed the power relations, inequalities and vulnerabilities, as well as advocacy
and agency, that result from women’s increased dependence on digital technologies (van Zoonen, 1992, Antonio
and Tuffley, 2014). Still we must examine the configurations of marginality and advantage that mark different
African societies when it comes to ICT access and use. For example, it is important to ask questions such as:
How does ICT use in a rural village in Kenya differ from the gendered experiences of rural dwellers in the
Democratic Republic of Congo that is emerging from conflict? It bears reminding that Africa, the world’s
second populous continent, is a complex continent of 54 countries with a population of more than 1.3 billion
people from varied ethnic groups. Though rich in natural resources, with a growing middle class, the continent is
also the world’s poorest where the majority of people live on less than $1.90 a day
(https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/). The 2017 gender statistics report of the UN indicates
that globally, there are 122 women aged 25 to 34 living in extreme poverty for every 100 men of the same age
group (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/). It is important to probe the ways in which Africa’s
income disparities influence women’s access and use of media and information technologies.
Recently, in a bid to accelerate progress in its 54 countries, the African Union served notice that it aspires to
“digitally connect every individual, business and government in Africa by 2030” and has drafted a digital
transformation strategy for the continent (African Union, 2019). Whether or not this ambitious plan is achievable
is up for debate in light of the difficulties many African countries have faced in achieving other lofty
developmental goals such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs). Still, the idea of digitally-connected African citizens must provoke us to ask how proposed regional and
national digitization strategies address issues relating to women and marginalised groups. We know that African
women and men have different (and sometimes similar) access to and control of resources, including digital
resources. A working paper by UN Women (September 2019) reports that the digital gender gap has grown
rather than shrunk, especially in Africa, where, in 2016, this gap stood at 23 percent. These reports often show
that within countries the digital divide is not only gendered, but also reveals disparities by age and the urban-
rural location. It is realities like this that signal to us the importance of interrogating the conditions under which
shades of access and affordability, as well as empowerment, innovation and creativity, occur in women’s
relationships with digital technologies.
This special volume of Ada is focused on studies that feature cultures of media and technology in African
environments in furtherance of an inclusive feminist agenda aimed at contributing more authentic African
experiences to research knowledge. The articles in this special issue recognize gender as a socio-cultural
construct that must be conceptualized and researched with the peculiarities of culture and specificities of
different societies in mind (Oyewumi, 2011).
The essays in the volume document the varied ways in which media technologies are accessed and appropriated
in different locations on the continent. They force a re-think on how digital technologies are restructuring
gendered power relations and challenge us to consider re-constructing gender narratives to account for this. The
authors have approached questions of how gender operates in African environments and cultures of media and
technology using different methodological approaches -- ethnography, content analysis, contextual analysis, and
quantitative methods.
Kwami’s essay sets the tone by providing a broad analysis on gender and ICT practices, policies, developments
and academic research in Africa and an exhaustive critique of what has or has not worked. The essay discusses
the interplay of marginality, mobilities and social networks in women’s use of mobile devices and suggests that,
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despite the opportunities they present, ICTs also “reinforce existing social inequities and in some cases
exacerbate them.” Her analysis offers several recommendations on addressing the challenges inherent in African
women’s access and appropriation of media and technology and hints at a research agenda worth considering.
Atuhura’s contribution opens up critical new ways of interrogating narratives of victimhood and agency. Her re-
reading of Ilja Kok and Willem Timmers’ documentary on Ethiopia’s lip-plated Mursi women offers an
oppositional interpretation of the exploitation and commodification of Mursi women’s bodies by global tourists
by pointing to the various enactments of agency embedded in seeming acts of powerlessness represented in
media texts.
The need to re-examine narratives of victimhood and agency also informs Jaksch’s case study on an African
feminist, community-based intervention for maternal health. Jaksch shows how the participatory research
practice of Photovoice (PV) empowered women in the Hakuna Kama Mama project to share their experiences
and resulted in the deep insights researchers gained from localized understandings of maternal mortality and
morbidity in Zanzibar, Tanzania. As she argues in her paper, innovative approaches to knowledge production can
“serve as a corrective to the over-representation of African women as hapless victims, which robs them of their
agency.”
Additional insights into how power and authority manifest in the use of technology emerge from Komen’s case
study of the gendered uses of mobile phones in the rural community of Marakwet, Kenya. This paper enlightens
us on the multifarious and beneficial ways both men and women experience mobile phones and the manner in
which digital devices help to disrupt power relations by enabling women to circumvent household arrangements
that exacerbate their powerlessness. Like Jaksch, Komen’s examination of the term maendeleo, which has long
been used by ordinary Kenyans to describe their own development, highlights the importance of foregrounding
localized understandings into conceptualizations of Western terms accurately capture non-Western experiences.
Mohammed’s case study of a twitter campaign in Ghana, #WearYourDrossNow, uses critical framing analysis, in
the context of social media practices in Ghana, to reveal the religious, generational, and class based
characteristics of the “WearYourDrossNow campaign conducted by culture celebrity Mama Zimbi. The hashtag
activism shames sexually active young female middle class university students, and deploys marriage as a
reward available only to those engaging in heteronormative and abstinence practices.
Mohammed argues that the practice infantalizes young adult women, while also recuperating ‘feminist activism’
in the service of patriarchal religious systems, where it functions, regressively, to deny sexual choice to young
women. Importantly, the article points out that not all women’s social media activism is feminist and may
seriously undermine many other historic and ongoing campaigns to empower women.
Interesting questions continue to be raised on how gendered bodies are represented, signified and given meaning
in African contexts. Nyanoti’s comparative study of unequal photographic representations of female and male
Olympic athletes in Kenya feeds into existing studies on the gendered coverage of elite sports women (Sherry,
Osborne, & Nicholson, 2016). Using semiotic analysis to study two leading dailies in Kenya, the study shows
how Kenyan media construct sports as a male domain and represent women’s sporting prowess and
achievements as less significant than that of men.
Vanyoro’s essay allows for scholarly interrogation into the seldom studied subject of how males who engage in
sexual activity with members of the same sex are represented in media texts in the context of Africa. The study
deploys discourse and semiotic analysis to examine the dominant language and images that normalize gay,
bisexual, transgender and intersex (GBTI) masculinity among men on the QueerLife Website. The findings
indicate that the construction of gender-based binaries of masculinity and femininity, long the subject of feminist
critiques of mainstream media texts, have been replicated in GBTI media texts. The discursive frames used
masculinity and femininity representations in GBTI texts betray the abiding influence of patriarchal frames
determine a particular masculine attributes as desirable, while conversely framing those considered feminine as
undesirable. Importantly, Vanyoro’s analysis problematizes broader power relations implicated in other identity
markers such as race and class, which form the basis of inclusion, exclusion and mis-representations of the
“other,” even within marginalized groups such as Africa’s GBTI community.
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Conclusion
The essays in this special volume are by no means exhaustive of the gendered nature of media technologies in
Africa; however, they strongly suggest Africa as “a rich site ‘of new knowledge and ways of knowing and
being’” (Adebanwi, 2016 quoting Comaroff & Comaroff 2011). The range of issues that arise from the articles
demonstrate how media and technologies can simultaneously enhance and exacerbate gendered life situations.
Access and affordability are significant factors in how these technologies are experienced, but so are existing
social hierarchies that have long structured power relations in communities. Emerging scholarship on Africa
must thus avoid universalizing women’s experiences and take into account the contexts within which these
technologies are deployed in order to better illuminate how they disrupt inherent inequalities and provide
opportunities for women to innovate their way to empowerment.
Referenes
Adebanwi, W. 2016. Rethinking knowledge production in Africa. Africa: The Journal of the International
African Institute 86 (2), 350-353. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/614707
African Union. African leaders redefine the future through digital transformation. Press release, February 11,
2019. Retrieved from https://au.int/en/pressreleases/20190211/african-leaders-redefine-future-through-digital-
transformation. Accessed November 14, 2019
Antonio, A. and Tuffley, D. 2014. "The Gender Digital Divide in Developing Countries". Future Internet. 6.
673-687. 10.3390/fi6040673.
GSMA Annual Report, 2019. Retrieved from:https://annualreport.gsma.com/2019/about-the-gsma/. Accessed
November 14, 2019.
Internet World Stats. 2019. "World Internet usage and population statistics 2019 mid-year estimates". Retrieved
from https://internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. Accessed November 14, 2019.
Mabweazara, H. M. 2015. "Mainstreaming African digital cultures, practices and emerging forms of citizen
engagement", African Journalism Studies, 36:4, 1-11, DOI: 10.1080/23743670.2015.1119486.
Nyamnjoh, F. B., & Brudvig, I. (2016). Mobilities, ICTs and marginality in Africa: Comparative perspectives.
Oyewumi, O. 2016. Gender epistemologies in Africa: Gendering Traditions, Spaces, Social Institutions, and
Identities. Palgrave Macmillan US.
Sherry, E., Osborne, A. & Nicholson, M. 2016. Images of sports women: A review. Sex Roles 74: 299-309.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-015-0493-x.
UN Women. 2019. Leveraging digital finance for gender equality and women’s empowerment. Working Paper,
September, 2019.
Willems, W. and Mano, W. (2016). Everyday media culture in Africa. New York: Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315472775.
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14. 9-29. 10.1177/016344392014001002.
Citation
Gadzekpo, A., Gardner, P. & Steeves, H.L. 2020. "Introduction: Emerging Gender, Media and Technology
Scholarship in Africa: Opportunities and Conundrums in African Women’s Navigating Digital Media". Ada, 16.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/ada.2020.16.1
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
Editors
Audrey Gadzekpo
Audrey Gadzekpo, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication Studies, University of
Ghana. She has more than 25 years of experience in teaching, research and advocacy on media, gender and
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2/27/2021 “Emerging Gender, Media and Technology Scholarship in Africa: Opportunities and Conundrums in African Women’s Navigating Digital M…
governance, and close to 30 years practical experience as a media practitioner. Some of her publications on
gender include: “Media and Gender Socialization”(2016) in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and
Sexuality Studies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd; “Establishing the Presence of Women” in Ghanaian Media
History(2015) in Ansu-Kyeremeh, K., Gadzekpo A. and Amoakohene, M. (eds.), A Critical Appraisal of
Communication Theory and Practice in Ghana. University of Ghana Reader Series. Accra: Digibooks; Ghana:
Women in Decision-making–New Opportunities, Old Story(2013), in Byerly, C. (ed.),The Palgrave International
Handbook of Women and Journalism. Palgrave Macmillan; and “Missing Links: African Media Studies and
Feminist Concerns”,(2008).Journal of African Media Studies. JAMS Vol. 1. No.1, pp. 69-80
Paula Gardner
Paula Gardner, PhD, is Asper Chair in Communications in the Faculty of Communication Studies and
Multimedia, at McMaster University, where she directs Pulse Lab. Gardner is a critical, feminist scholar, with
expertise in co-design, media studies, interdisciplinary methods and disability- and trauma-informed multimodal
practice. Her team is currently creating ABLE, an interactive platform that transforms movement into digital art
experiences, to encourage physical, cognitive and affective health benefits in older adults with dementia.
Gardner’s multimodal and assistive technology work and her critical text-based work is published in
Communication, Feminist, STS, and HCI arenas; she is currently a book entitled Pace, the Affective Labour of
Activity Trackers and a documentary film entitled No Asylum.
H. Leslie Steeves
H. Leslie Steeves is Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Journalism &
Communication at the University of Oregon, USA. Dr. Steeves’ research addresses overlapping topics on media
in and about sub-Saharan Africa, including: gender, media and development/social change; information and
communication technologies (ICTs) for development; gender violence; and entertainment and tourism
representations of Africa. In 2017 she received ICA’s Teresa Award for the Advancement of Feminist
Scholarship. She co-authored with Srinivas Melkote Communication for Development: Theory and Practice for
Empowerment and Social Justice ( 2015). She serves on several editorial boards and has published in leading
journals in media studies, including, Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication,
Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, Media,
Culture & Society, International Communication Gazette, and African Journalism Studies. She has received two
Fulbright Scholar grants for teaching and research in Kenya and Ghana; and she directs an annual study abroad
internship program in Accra, Ghana, in collaboration with the University of Ghana.
Reviewers
Melanie Bunce
Esi Eduwaa Thompson
Ashley Cordes
Tanja Bosch
Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh
Melissa Tully
Brenna Wolf-Monteiro
Amanda Cote
Shehram Mokhtar
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2/27/2021 “Emerging Gender, Media and Technology Scholarship in Africa: Opportunities and Conundrums in African Women’s Navigating Digital M…
Jolene Fisher
Abena A. Yeboah-Banin
Karen Estlund
Radhika Parameswaran
Ylva Rodny-Gumede
Brian Ekdale
Katrien Pype
Ammina Kothari
Cover photo taken by H. Leslie Steeves, with permission of participants.
Next Chapter
Framing the Other by Dorothy Atuhura
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