Female empowerment is often thought of as a critical aspect of achieving gender equality. Gender equality has been one of the UN’s greatest priorities for a few decades now: the organization has given it strong consideration in the Sustainable Development 2030 Agenda, in the Millennium Development Goals established in the year 2000, and in the still relevant Beijing Platform for Action from 1995. Worldwide, progress has been made, but Sub-Saharan Africa still remains one of the regions further behind in terms of gender equality and related issues affecting women.

The first of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) set in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly commits to ending poverty in all its forms and dimensions everywhere by 2030. As of today, this remains one of the biggest challenges facing humanity. Extreme poverty is currently defined as living on less than $1.90 a day.

We are very pleased to announce that we are one of 9 winners of the #SmartDevelopmentHack! With #SmartDevelopmentHack the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) called for innovative digital solutions to tackle the challenges caused by the coronavirus outbreak in low- and middle-income countries. Under the patronage of the BMZ together with the Directorate-General International Cooperation and Development from the EU Commission, other EU member states, tech-companies and civil society,  the global hackathon was launched as part of the upcoming German Council Presidency.

Founded in 1990 in Bolivia, Pro Mujer has become one of Latin America’s leading organizations committed to the empowerment of women. Their integrated approach offers access to finance, health and educational services, thus supporting their clients by creating opportunities and helping them start and grow their own businesses. Pro Mujer is also focusing on issues like gender-based violence and teen pregnancy and migration crises and advancing health care for women by raising awareness and ensuring more women have access to preventive and treatment care.

Without having access to even the simplest basic knowledge, facing their enormous day-to-day challenges is a losing game for women in rural areas in most developing countries. We can change that by simply providing them with vital information in an accessible way. Here are some examples showing how Audiopedia can help rural women live a life in health and dignity.

We are delighted that our project Audiopedia.org has been recognized with the digital volunteering award of state government of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. The awards were granted for outstanding volunteering projects that are realized digitally or with digital support. We accepted the award at the 2nd Digital Forum in Mainz, Germany.

The Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Creativity (KOFAC) published a nice article about our project in their online magazine "Science Times". KOFAC is a non-profit organization fully supported by the Korean Government through the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. Here is the first paragraph roughly translated to English:

Deutsche Welle or DW is a German public international broadcaster. The service is available in 30 languages. Deutsche Well published an interesting article about our project in Uganda called "Uganda: Women use the power of knowledge to escape poverty".

When it comes to literacy worldwide, even today girls and women perform far worse than men. In many countries, particularly in West and Central Africa and South Asia, illiterate women far outnumber their male counterparts. 

Tabi Labo, a leading Japanese mobile news platform with more than 9 million readers featured an extensive article about our project.