Today on Twitter @ZiaGe, or “Patricia G”, posted a picture of herself behind the wheel of a Lexus dressed in her hijab in act of defiance. Saudi Arabia is a country where women are banned from driving.

She is one of the hundreds of Saudi women using the hash tag #women2drive to mobilize a campaign in an attempt to get a green light on paving the way to this new freedom.

Saudi Arabia is the only Muslim country that does not allow women to drive, and although it is not an official law, it is culturally unacceptable. Religious rulings typically enforced by police have the same effect as a ban, and women must rely on chauffeurs or male relatives for transportation.

Al Jazeera English Stream explains the situation:

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world in which women cannot drive. Additional prohibitions against taking buses, riding bikes, and appearing in public alone essentially rule out independent travel for women

In 1990, 47 women took to the streets to challenge this ban by taking their families’ cars out for a drive. They were placed in jail for a day and their passports were taken.

32-year-old Manal al-Sherif, a key figure in Women2Drive movement, faced a similar fate last month.

Ms. Sharif was arrested for nine days after she drove two times and they were highly publicized on Youtube; she also highlighted them on the Facebook and Twitter campaigns she helped organize.

In the video featured at the end of this article, Al Sharif says women need to learn how to drive in order to protect themselves and their families. Additionally, not all women can afford to hire private drivers, she says.

This all comes in light of the recent Arab Spring uprisings, where social media is a popular tool to help mobilize campaigns and movements.

The Women2Drive campaign encourages Saudi women all across Saudi Arabia to participate in a collective protest scheduled for June 17.

Arab Studies Institute Jadaliyya has some more information regarding campaign plans, which included:

• Encouraging women with international driver’s licenses (or those from other countries) to drive their cars on June 17.
• Taking photographs and videos to be posted on Facebook in support of the cause.
• Adhering to the dress code (hijab) while driving.▪ We will obey the traffic laws and will not challenge the authorities if we are stopped for questioning.
• If we are pulled over we will firmly demand to be informed of which laws have been violated. Until now there is not one traffic law that prohibits a woman from driving her own vehicle herself.

The campaigns, which had attracted thousands of supporters — more than 12,000 on the Facebook page —have been blocked in the kingdom. In spite this, a few Youtube videos that have been posted, along with gaining national and international support.

Screen shot of Facebook campaign

There has been an online petition addressed to King Abdullah, asking him to grant women the right to drive, which gathered signatures from more than 600 men and women; and today, Princess Ameerah al stated in an interview that she herself wants to drive and promises a women’s revolution.

Alternatively, the Saudi Women for Driving, the coalition of Saudi women’s rights activists, bloggers and academics campaigning for the right to drive, sent a letter to Clinton and to her European Union counterpart, Catherine Ashton.

“Where are you when we need you most?” they asked 
in the letter which the State Department told reporters Monday it had just received, it continues: “In the context of the Arab Spring and U.S. commitments to support women’s rights, is this not something the United States’ top diplomat would want to publicly support?”

One reporter questioned that the Secretary is more concerned about not estranging relations with Saudi Arabia when the U.S. needs help on Yemen and Bahrain, more than about defending women’s rights. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland defended Clinton, saying the Secretary “has been engaged in quiet diplomacy.”

More importantly, Saudi women are taking this movement, and their empowerment, into their own hands by coordinating their grassroots campaign using online tools.

Photo Credit: MobileActive

Aggregating and collecting data from cell phones is one of the best ways to ensure resources used to help fight poverty are efficiently being allocated, while gaining insight on what policies work the best.

According to Marcelo Giugale, the World Bank’s Director of Economic Policy and Poverty Reductions Programs for Africa, digital data collection is entirely transforming international development and bringing on, “revenge of the statistician”.

This transformation, he cites, have created two separate but interrelated effects in evaluating development projects.

Primarily, digital data collection allows funding from multilateral institutions, like the World Bank,  to be more effective.

Goals set for monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are quantified to see if the results are reached. Such as: how many children were treated for malaria, or what proportion of women use contraceptives?

This increased accuracy in household surveys can precisely identify who benefits from each dollar the government spends, also known as “benefit incidence analysis,” then structural adjustments can then be made to funnel funds to the appropriate recipient. Giugale elucidates by providing an example:

Most developing countries spend more bankrolling free public universities than building primary schools. But the main beneficiaries of that subsidized college education are the rich (who could pay tuition) not the poor (who could not)…Statistics lets you quantify these aberrations—and argue that the money should be redirected to those who really need it

Secondarily, he observed that surveys conducted on cell phones provide data to assess human capabilities so future policies and projects can be altered to fit the needs of those living in poverty and make outcomes more useful.

By assessing non-cognitive skills—such as reaction time and social interaction—educational programs can be designed to teach behaviors that will increase people’s productivity.

Marcelo Giugale Photo Credit: World Bank

Giugale argues that digital data collection can also measure how personal circumstances affect human opportunity. “We all know that children have no control or responsibility over their gender, skin color, birthplace, or parents’ income,” he contends.

“And yet, those kind of circumstances are sure-shot predictors of a child’s access to vaccination, potable water, kindergarten, the internet and many other platforms without which her probability of success is close to nil.”  Giugale cites the Human Opportunity Index as being a large proponent of this initiative in shaping policy.

The use of cell phones to collect data has broken the once unconventional method of researching people in their communities. These randomized trials are useful in gauging what policies and projects work best, and which are seemingly wasteful.

“As the use of cellular telephony expands among the poor — at flash speed in places like Kenya –the possibility of turning them into data sources becomes real…” he concludes, “How ironic that, in the end, the war against poverty may be won when those who try to help the poor get to literally listen to them.”

In this video, Guigale explains the Human Development Opportunity Index and how it helps reduce poverty:

Photo Credit: The Express Tribune

The annual observation of World Day to Combat Desertification is underway amid daunting projections, if immediate mitigation measures are ignored.

Desertification, which is caused by ‘land degradation in dry lands’ (not necessarily the creation of deserts), affects one in three people in some way, and costs the world economy US$42 billion annually. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates that almost two billion hectares of land in over 110 countries have been seriously degraded.

Land degradation is heightened by population pressure, intensification of agriculture, water-logging and salinity, among other things. Both water-logging and salinity are caused by poor irrigation and drainage, deforestation, overgrazing, soil erosion and poverty.

But the matter of poverty is two fold, as land degradation pose serious implications for efforts to reduce it and hunger worldwide. The developing world, namely Africa, Asia and Latin America, is home to 90% of those most affected— mostly subsistence farmers. This trend will expand the scarcity of arable lands and water resources, which will increase food insecurity for the most vulnerable. This will also raise political tensions over unequal land distribution across the developing world. A few large landholders own disproportionate hectares of land in predominantly arid countries such as Pakistan.

UNCCD logo for World Day to Combat Dessertification

Despite these impending challenges, too few governments have been proactive in informing their citizens. ICTs may be leveraged to improve basic farm extension services to reduce poor soil management, and other agricultural related causes of land degradation. Also, more states should embark on water resources development, water harvesting, well rehabilitation, wildlife restoration and biodiversity maintenance projects to mitigate land desertification and better prepare farmers and others to sustain their livelihoods. The success of any such effort will rest on the degree to which citizens are engaged –the range of ICTs available should certainly be leveraged.

Visit the UNCCD website to learn more about about the day of events.

Climate change is already posing challenges to agricultural productivity worldwide, and the sector is likely to encounter severe water woes as this intensifies. However, water management, which is crucial for sustainable agriculture, improved rural livelihoods and food security, has not yet been sufficiently harnessed and employed across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Consequently, immense opportunities for growth and economic

Credit: A Guide To Irrigation Methods — Irrigation Systems

advancement are being missed. Proper irrigation is vital for sustained agricultural growth, according to the FAO. The UN agency says efficient irrigation practices could result in increased crop yields of up to 400%. Yet, farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa, who are most dependent on rainfall, are hamstrung by a landscape with the fewest rainfall monitoring stations in the world, which are also complicated to read. This challenge is compounded by an unreliable climate information dissemination mechanism.

But, as with all challenges in the sector, new technologies are emerging that could provide better information for planning. Rainwatch, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) funded climate information system, seems set to help West African farmers, in particular, to overcome their water management challenges.

NOAA says Rainwatch uses GIS to “monitor monsoon rainfall and tracks season rainfall attributes”. It automatically streamlines rainfall data management, processing and visualization. The user-firendly tool has interactive faces, symbols and self-explanatory names. This simplicity eliminates the need for external assistance, including satellite information, to make use of the tool.

The successful 2009 piloting of the project, coupled with the abundant returns to farmers in Niger last year, a country with chronic water management issues, shows that there is great potential behind scaling-up this project. A key challenge will be getting farmers to use the technology, but the demonstrable benefits will prove to be a strong selling point.

The NOAA funded project received support from the African Center of Meteorological Applications for Development and CIMMS.

© Ramy Raoof (CC BY 2.0)

Throughout Africa human rights violations are being conducted all over the continent, but technology is shifting the power of information into the hands of the repressed.

Leveraging mobile phones and FM radio have been the channels to achieve this objective, according to the 2011 Amnesty International Annual Report.

Political activists and citizens have used other new communications forms, such as Facebook and Twitter, now easily available on mobile phones, to bring people to the streets to demand accountability.

Salil Shetty Photo Credit: Amnesty International

“In many countries in Africa,” says Secretary General, Salil Shetty, “there is now a vibrant civil society, which, although often still repressed, can no longer be ignored by those in power.”

The report states that 2010 may be known as the year where technology aligned both activists and journalists to bring truth to the world of power.

The Secretary General also mentioned that innovative crowdsourcing technologies, such as forerunner Ushahidi.com of Kenya, have opened up a whole new set of possibilities for conflict prevention by tracking and recording abuses.

He acknowledges that they have been tools that have aided the struggle for human rights, despite the adversary from governments, in particular those in the Middle East and Northern Africa, to restrict the flow of information and censor communication.

In this sense, Shetty cautions, that the use of technologies are not a magic bullet solution that can completely determine and end human rights violations: “Technology will serve the purposes of those who control it – whether their goal is the promotion of rights or the undermining of rights,” he advised.

“We must be mindful that in a world of asymmetric power, the ability of governments and other institutional actors to abuse and exploit technology will always be superior to the grassroots activists, the beleaguered human rights advocate, the intrepid whistleblower and the individual…”

Even so, Shetty digressed that these are amazing times for human rights activists who recognize the potential of technology, which provides the context to evade censorship and reveal truth. They also holds the promise, he continued, that we will be, “living in a truly flat world,” where we are all connected by an accessible information that flows across borders and all can provide a voice to help determine major decisions in our lives.

“Fifty years on the world has changed dramatically, but the imperative for individuals to stand together to fight injustice and protect the rights of human beings, wherever they may be, has not,” the Secretary General emphasized.

Assessments of the state of human rights in countries across Africa, Amnesty concluded:

Uganda—law enforcement officers “committed human rights violations, including unlawful killings and torture, and perpetrators were not held to account” and “a number of new and proposed laws threatened the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly”.

Zimbabwe—“police continued to arbitrarily arrest and detain human rights defenders and journalists undertaking legitimate human rights work”. However, there was “some loosening of restrictions on the media and parliament debated a bill to reform the repressive Public Order and Security Act”.

Swaziland—“human rights defenders and political activists were subjected to arbitrary detention, ill-treatment and harassment … Torture and incidents of unjustified use of lethal force were reported. The prime minister appeared to publicly condone the use of torture.”

Sudan—“human rights violations, mainly by the National Intelligence and Security Service, continued to be committed with impunity. Perceived critics of the government were arrested, tortured or ill-treated and prosecuted for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly. Death sentences were handed down, including against juveniles. Women, young girls and men were arrested and flogged in the north because of their ‘dress’ or ‘behaviour’ in public places.”

These summaries were provided on a post on AllAfrica.com