ABSTRACT
My task for this chapter is to name the issues that arise for women in the developing world in and around the uses of technologies for learning. This is a difficult task, perhaps impossible, given the complex, diverse, and multilayered realities of women’s lives. Consider, for example, the frustrations of the professional woman in, say, Sudan, who is unable to access her e-mail on the family computer because her son has changed the password without telling her. Her frustrations cannot easily be compared along any dimension with those of the woman who is living in one of the many communities of people in and around Khartoum who have been displaced from their homelands by the war in the south. This woman’s frustrations center on another kind of technology failure. She has managed to do everything she needs to do to get to her weekly tutorial for the primary health course she is taking. She has arranged care for her small children, cooked the midday meal for her husband, and carefully saved all week from the pay she earns as a worker in the local clinic to make sure she has enough money for the bus fares. And now the bus she is on, for which she has already paid her precious coins, has broken down, which means she will miss the other two buses she must take in order to reach the study center. No one set of issues, no one voice, can readily represent these divergent realities.
