Arusha Women School of Internet Governance (AruWSIG) is a premier Programme whose overarching aim is to mentor girls and women in Arusha (Tanzania) and its environs, through professional digital rights outreach symposiums and hackathons on the topic of Internet Governance. AruWSIG is co-convened by Kuza STEAM Generation (KsGEN) and Center for Youth empowerment and leadership (CYEL).
AruWSIG is the first only women SIG that has been running since 2018,when the first cohort started followed by the second edition in 2019.
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The 1st Arusha Women School of Internet Governance was held on 27th and 28th April 2018 in Arusha. It took place at the Arusha Institute of Accountancy (AIA). This edition of AruWSIG benefited 90 participants,this event was made possible by the Internet Society,Localization Lab,ICANNWiki,HIVOS East Africa and Dot.Africa.
The forum brought together a great number of youth to the table, some officials from government entities and the private sector, academia, the media, civil society, technical community and individual users to deliberate on existing and emerging Internet-related matters.
This event was also linked to ISOC’s women in ICT WomenSIG edit-a-thon workshop where editing of various women figures in ICT and other relevant content were edited and published on Swahili ICANNWiki website
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This year’s edition was made possible through the support of the Center for collaboration on ICT policy in southern and eastern Africa (CIPESA) through the African digital rights Fund and other partners such as Localization lab, Facebook, Jamii Forums and Zaina Foundation. The event was co-convened by Kuza STEAM Generation (KsGEN) and Center for Youth empowerment and leadership (CYEL) who were part of this year’s digital rights fund inaugural grantees.
A total of 18 women and men were capacitated as part of the Arusha Women school of Internet Governance and another 25 as fellows to attend the Tanzania Internet Governance Forum that preceded AruWSIG on October 2019.Out of the 25 who attended the Tanzanian IGF, 7 of them where AruWSIG19’s fellows and the remaining 18 supported to attend the forum.This event was marked by day zero of localization of the internew’s safe sisters guide which was successfully translated to Swahili.
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This year’s AruWSIG was the third edition, with the second edition having taken place in September 2019, and the first in April 2018.The school attracted sponsorship from AFRINIC – the regional Internet registry for Africa and the Indian Ocean region, Facebook, ICANN – the global multi-stakeholder organization that coordinates the Internet DNS, IP addresses and autonomous system numbers, and Localization Lab – a Not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support the translation and localization of digital safety tutorials and tools geared at addressing security, privacy and anonymity online.A total of 38 fellows of which 36 were women.
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This year’s AruWSIG was the fourth edition, with the theme for this year’s edition was: Fostering Access, Safety and Inclusivity in the pandemic age.The SIG was funded by Article19 East Africa, Facebook, ICANN, Localization Lab,Mozilla, and Paradigm Initiative (PIN).We had 24 fellows of which 19 were women.
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This year’s AruWSIG was the fifth edition with the theme:Digital resilience for women on the web, it was sponsored by Mozilla, Meta and Afrinic.A total of 30 fellows all women.