ABSTRACT
As the previous chapter illustrated, there is a large body of work that raises critical questions about the capacity of knowledge-based development interventions designed to encourage and enable underprivileged groups, including ‘poor women’, to acquire and use atomised, discreet pieces of knowledge served up with the purpose of promoting development. Such approaches deny that knowledge creation is a process that is iterative and rooted in particular contexts, histories and institutions. Moreover, efforts to promote development through improved access to ICTs obfuscates attention away from structural and systemic inequalities in relation to information access in which new ICTs are themselves embedded. This chapter delves deeper to consider the role of knowledge intermediaries in the global information infrastructure. It focuses on ingrained perceptions of the capacity of Southern women’s NGOs in particular to produce, access and ultimately promote information uptake in a way that facilitates both women’s empowerment and strengthened Southern knowledge systems, which, as we saw in the Introduction, are widely perceived as prerequisites for achieving improved development outcomes. There is a tendency, both in the literature and in practice, for women’s NGOs and networks acting as knowledge intermediaries in particular to be perceived as exemplars in the field of development communication. This chapter seeks to unpack this tendency through interrogating the inclusion by Northern stakeholders of a discursively constructed category of ‘Southern women’s NGO’ as a signifier of commitments to gender equality, poverty reduction and/or social justice. Whilst the recognition of Southern women’s heretofore invisibilised agency marked a victory for Southern feminists working both with and through NGOs, the ‘Southern women’s NGO’ has come to symbolise the ultimate organisational form of grounded, representative, collective action. The so-called ‘voices’ of women, galvanised through a growing transnational feminist movement and gaining visibility through multilateral commitments to women’s rights, are gathered through women’s NGOs, frequently upheld for their presumed capacity to act as knowledge intermediaries and thus both reach and represent the needs, interests and voices of marginalised people and in turn promote empowerment and, ultimately, development.
