[Training] Digital Rights Foundation Reaches Out to the Young Women Activists of KPK

Technology acts as a powerful tool for freedom of expression. It often provides the marginalized groups of society with alternate mediums to get their message across. Story telling is a transformative art that can be applied in diverse settings. By integrating technology with the centuries-old tradition of story telling, new milestones have been reached in the field of communications. With the rapid growth of social media, digital storytelling has emerged as a very effective technique for social advocacy.

Digital Rights Foundation as a feminist organization remains committed to the use of ICTs for women empowerment. DRF regularly conducts training for women activists, writers, bloggers, human rights defenders and journalists to enhance their technical skills. Besides offering support for staying safe on the internet, we also conduct digital storytelling workshops. The key objective of these storytelling sessions is to help women speak out for themselves by teaching them to narrate their experiences in a persuasive manner.

This month, Aware Girls from Peshawar partnered with Digital Rights Foundation to organize a 4days hands-on digital storytelling workshop in Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa.  The training sessions commenced on August 16, 2013 and continued till August 19, 2013. After a careful assessment, twenty five participants had been selected to participate in the session. The theme for this particular program was creating awareness regarding gender-based violence.

During the course of workshop, women activists were trained to develop their own stories using a wide array of digital tools. Participants were familiarized with a range of photography, videography, editing and post-production techniques. Four days of intensive coaching enabled the women create and share their unique perspectives on gender based violence. The participants were provided one-on-one assistance to help them customize their projects and generate focused messages in short presentations. Through digital stories, the feelings and thoughts of women activists were brought into action. On the final day, a special story screening event was arranged. Participants were guided to carry out self-evaluation of their work. To mark the successful completion of the training, certificates were awarded to the participants.

Digital Rights Foundation plans to document and disseminate the stories on various digital platforms. DRF also aims to launch more  such projects in future that involve the use of digital media for addressing gender-based violence and violence against women. In that context, DRF seeks to develop interactive training manuals so that participants would be able to carry out similar workshops within their organizations.

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