Do Women Win? Transnational development NGOs, discourses of empowerment, and cross-cultural technology initiatives in the Global South

Abstract

The Global North now accepts the cultural logic of "The Girl Effect," or the notion that aid to girls in the Global South is economically impactful. It is in this context that NGOs take residence in the Global South to train girls in digital technology. We examine the ethical and social justice implications of the cross-cultural communication in these initiatives through a case study of Women Win, a transnational NGO's digital storytelling (DST) project. In this qualitative case study, we analyze 37 DST videos, coding recurring discursive themes in both their language and visual iconography and examining the ownership rights, authorship, and sharing practices of these videos. The results suggest that the girls in the DST project labor to produce affective evidence for Women Win that circumscribes them as postfeminist development subjects, replicating themes and terms originating in feminism of the Global North. From this inquiry, we conclude that the concept of participatory culture does not travel neatly from the Global North to the Global South. We suggest that professional and technical communication scholars further scrutinize the complexities of cross-cultural communication in global development initiatives, through what this case study reveals about "large culture" ideologies and the political economy of affective labor in technology training. We conclude with a call to action for international professional and technical communicators to find approaches to DST training that are local in nature, and examine how training initiatives might be more sensitive to non-Western narratives by creating dialogic, localized design processes for training materials. 132The Global North now accepts the cultural logic of "The Girl Effect," or the notion that aid to girls in the Global South is economically impactful. This cultural logic relies on data-driven communication that presents said impact; in essence, numbers rendered visually and verbally, through narrative, compellingly communicate both effect and affect to Western donors. Evidence of girls-in-need and girls-doing-for-themselves incites the emotions of those in the Global North, and, as a result, continuous addition of affective stories, visuals, and animations adds to the economic properties of The Girl Effect (Murphy, 2013). It is in this context that many transnational development NGOs initiate programs that train girls in the Global South in digital technology in order to produce their own narratives through digital storytelling projects.In this article, we examine the ethical and social justice implications of the cross-cultural communication in these initiatives through a case study of one transnational development NGO's digital storytelling (DST) project. W omen W in partners with large multinational corporations (donors/investors) and then regrants to local, grassroots NGOs in the Global South for strategic projects;here, training girls to make their own digital media narratives. This qualitative case study involves two components. First, we examine the 3...

Bridging Analysis and Action

“…A second strategy is to legitimize women’s technologies, such as household technologies or reproductive technology, through analyses that recognize these technologies as worthy of study. One way to build on these kinds of feminist critiques is to seek out technologies of the Global South, for example, in our examinations through a social justice perspective (see Ding, Li, & Haigler, 2016; Mukherjee & Williams, 2016; Opel & Stevenson, 2016). A third approach is studying how technology affects women in the workplace in order to “challenge the popular belief that technologies are designed and chosen from value-neutral positions” (Gurak & Bayer, 1994, p. 262).…”