Firoze Manji is founding Executive Director of Fahamu - Networks for Social Justice, a pan African organization with offices in Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and the UK.

Fahamu exists to support the development and growth of a powerful social justice movement in Africa. There are three core areas of activity:

Training: Fahamu aims to strengthen human rights organizations by providing training programs that include sufficient pre workshop preparation and post workshop follow-up to ensure substantive learning. Fahamu has created CD-ROM based training packages covering subjects from advocacy to financial management to gender violence and conflict.

News & Media: Pambazuka News is a weekly electronic newsletter providing commentary and analysis on issues of social justice across Africa, published in English, French and Portuguese. There are 26,000 subscribers and half a million unique visitors to the site. Content is also published on allafrica.com and it is widely used by mainstream media. Pambazuka was one of the first African organizations to use podcasts and videocasts.

Advocacy: Fahamu was heavily involved in efforts to persuade countries to sign up to the African Union's Rights of Women in Africa Protocol. The organization attracted a great deal of attention for its strategy of getting people to sign a petition via cell phones. Within 18 months it had persuaded the necessary 15 countries to ratify the Protocol.

Firoze shared a number of his insights from his experience using ICTs in these areas:

There remain real barriers to use of ICTs in Africa: Middle class Africans often have more than one cell phone each; penetration figures can therefore be misleading. The cost associated with text and especially voice services is prohibitive for many. While email is cheap, web surfing is expensive and due to low bandwidth, painfully slow. 

Paper formats are in some instances still the most useful: Feedback from students on Fahamu courses has shown consistent demand for paper resources. Students rarely have their own home computer or laptop and they may travel often; internet cafes can be unsafe environments for women alone. For these reasons, Fahamu continues to produce print resources. It also recently launched Pambazuka Press to promote African writers.  Books will be sold at cost to distributors in Africa and at commercial rates elsewhere.

Technology tools are a complement to, not substitute for real engagement: Analysis of the Rights of Women Protocol petition showed that less than 10% of signatures had come via cell phones. It was the political legwork of going through the protocol in person with each individual that made the real difference to the outcome. This confirms Firoze's view that tools such as cell phones cannot create social change where there is no existing real-world network for them to tap into. We need to be wary of fetishizing technology tools, attributing to them powers they simply cannot have.

Technology, Froze argues, tends to reflect and amplify existing social relations. So while ICTs can enable people to voice their own experience in a way that was not available to them before, they can just as easily serve to shore up existing power structures.

Global Voices was inspired by an incident in 2004, when a friend reading a New York Times article about Cameroon's elections posed the question: is there anyone in Cameroon blogging about this? Along with his colleague, former CNN Beijing journalist Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan convened a group of bloggers from the developing world at Harvard. What came out strongly from these discussions was a desire for participants to be able to read each others' blogs. What started as Rebecca and Ethan each summarizing a couple of hundred blogs daily has grown into the Global Voices website, which uses a network of 400 editors to filter, translate and provide context to global blogs, making them accessible to readers around the world.

Since 2004, there have been some major changes to the context in which Global Voices operates. The organization has tried to respond to each of these:

• There has been massive expansion in internet access across the developing world, but rarely beyond the middle class and educated. Rising Voices allows media organizations from developing countries to apply for small grants to help them use digital media in their communities. A number of great success stories coming out of this initiative have demonstrated that it is possible to get traction for citizen media, even in very low resource communities.
• The digital space has emerged as a political space. This has prompted far greater levels of censorship. Global Voices Advocacy works to highlight cases of individuals arrested for involvement in citizen journalism and attempts to keep these stories live. It also works to document censorship of publishing platforms and to provide spaces where people can blog anonymously.
• In 2004, almost all blogging was in English. Now the majority of people are blogging in their own languages, about local issues. Translation therefore becomes a greater challenge. ProjectLinguauses volunteer translators to amplifyGlobal Voicesin many languages other than English.

Ethan suggested three possible theories about what we are seeing in the growth of social media:

• Social media will be the natural organizing tool for a new generation.
• Social media is an asymmetric tool - it is what you use when the tools of more effective mainstream media are not available to you.
• Social media is a story in itself - it can draw attention to a story that might otherwise not be picked up.

Crisis situations such as the protests in Iran and the Haitian earthquake have started to legitimize the use of social media by mainstream media outlets, blurring the boundaries between professional and citizen reporting. And some of the key challenges associated with access and language barriers are beginning to be addressed. But the problem of global attention span will be hardest to solve. So many situations never receive coverage and for those that do, the media cycle rarely allows them to stay in the spotlight beyond a few weeks. We have developed long standing bad habits in our understanding of what constitutes news. Social media has dramatically changed who is able to speak; but will it change how we choose to listen? This remains a major challenge.