Opportunity to Nurture Women Bloggers!
Are you a blogger interested in encouraging more people to blog? Do you enjoy working with young women?
Fahamu is looking for mentors to participate in its Blogs for African Women (BAWo) project, which is for young African women who are new to blogging, from July to August 2008. The project is targeted at young Kenyan women.

What is this project about?
BAWo is a project for African women who want to start blogging or who are new to blogging. The young bloggers will post each week on an assigned topic. They will also be expected to comment on each other’s posts as well as the mentors’.

What do you have to do?
Each mentor is assigned a week to post. You will post once at the start of the week. Your post will provide the young bloggers with ideas and guidance for their own posts.
You will comment on the young women’s posts. You are also encouraged to comment on the other mentors’ posts during their assigned weeks.
We will work with you to come up with suitable topics for the young women.

What qualities should a mentor have?
We welcome all bloggers who are culturally and gender sensitive and who are interested in working with young women. We particularly encourage Kenyan-based women bloggers to participate in this project.
Why this project?
Internet use in the African continent, although growing, is still fairly low due to many factors which discourage Africans from using the Internet and other Communication Technologies (ICTs) such as no or limited access to the Internet, erratic electricity supply, and low literacy levels.
Women’s Internet use (and consequently blogging) continues to be very low. A cursory browse of the African blogosphere will show that male bloggers make up the majority of African bloggers, with many residing outside of the African continent.
While this project cannot remove many of the barriers to ICT use, it aims to introduce Kenyan women to blogging as a tool for self-expression within a nurturing environment, and in the long-run encourage an active engagement with technology.
The objectives of this project are:
To encourage Kenyan women who want to start blogging and support
those who recently started blogging
To help balance gender disparity in blogging
To encourage Kenyan women to report their own stories as an
alternative to mainstream media
To increase the amount of locally-relevant content available on the
Internet
To encourage a love for writing and reading
To promote weblogs as a method of democratic expression
To encourage more Kenyan women to think about how to incorporate
other technology tools into their lives

What do you do next?
If you are interested in becoming a mentor or know someone who is, please contact Stella Chege at [email][email protected] Please write a few lines about yourself and your interest in this project, including your blog URL.