Featured image credit: WOCinTech Chat Creative Commons License

The Current Situation

There’s no doubt that there is a glaring gender gap in tech. The widely accepted number of jobs held by women in the industry is 30%, but when you look at the percentage of women actually filling engineering roles, that figure shrinks considerably.

Let’s take a look at some of the giants in tech. At both Facebook and Google, women make up around a third of the company’s payroll, but only 16% of technical jobs at Facebook and 18% at Google are held by female engineers. At Twitter, it’s only 10%. These figures are the norm across the industry – in Europe, only 7% of engineering jobs are held by women!

Now, this isn’t just a women’s issue, a corporate responsibility problem, or a diversity issue. This gap is hurting companies’ bottom-lines and is detrimental to the industry overall.

If you look at any number of metrics, a gender-balanced team outperforms a predominantly male or predominantly female team. The numbers show that gender diversity has big payoffs. Teams with at least one female executive tend to receive valuations that are 64% larger than companies that only have men in leadership positions.

As Toptal Co-Founder and COO Breanden Beneschott put it, “If men and women are equally intelligent, statistically speaking, then out of the smartest ten people in the world, five should be male and five should be female.” Therefore, “if your team is anything less than an equal balance of men and women, then your team is probably not the best it can be.”

What is being done to address this gender gap?

The good news is that leading tech companies agree on this and they’re launching initiatives to get more women into top engineering positions. The solution here is more complicated than just doubling down on recruitment efforts for female engineers, though. There simply aren’t enough female engineers in the job market right now. While there’s no one reason for this, Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani explained that popular culture has a lot to do with turning young women away from tech. Girls take cues from TV shows, fashion magazines, and social media that tech is a man’s domain and figure it’s not a path they should follow.

So companies are trying to get involved at the ground level, not just recruiting computer science graduates but also showing girls at a young age that they actively want them to enter STEM fields, both in the classroom and after they’ve received their diploma. Both Etsy and Intel partner with Girls Who Code and Girl Develop it to build a strong educational pipeline that supports aspiring female developers.

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In October 2015, Toptal launched Toptal Scholarships for Female Developers, which will award 12 aspiring female engineers $5,000 and a year of one-on-one mentorship with a senior developer from the network. Toptal is encouraging girls of all ages and educational backgrounds to apply by making a meaningful contribution to open source and then writing a personal blog post about it. They’re announcing one winner per month for a year.

Through partnerships with educational organizations and the creation of mentorship programs, these companies are getting at the root of a systemic issue. There’s a long road to gender parity in tech, but they’re at the forefront of a solution that will bring more female engineers into the industry and give their companies a competitive edge.

About Grace

Grace Fish Headshot
Grace Fish is a writer from San Francisco currently working at Toptal. She graduated with a degree in History from Princeton in June 2015, and has been been living as a digital nomad ever since.

By Norman Shamas and Samita Thapa

In a previous post, we wrote about why global development practitioners need to be data skeptics. One of the many reasons that we need to be skeptical about the data we are collecting is the biases that are incorporated in the data. The data bias is especially significant when it comes to gender data. Women and groups that don’t identify with binary genders are largely missing or misrepresented in global development data.

Data is a crucial component of any program or intervention. It justifies the need for a specific program, show its effectiveness, and allows us to improve it through evaluation. But this important information tells us little if more than half of the population is missing or misrepresented, so we need to start looking at data with a gender lens.
data in the program cycle

Data on women raises awareness of women related issues

With 62 million girls not attending school worldwide, the U.S. government was able to justify their “Let Girls Learn” initiative. This initiative was announced in February and is aimed at making education a reality for girls around the world. USAID is one of the agencies involved in the government-wide initiative and have presented their approach with data to support it.

But there is still a problem getting good data on women. GSMA’s 2015 Bridging the Gender Gap Report highlights two systemic barriers to mobile ownership and usage for women:

  1. lack of disaggregated data and
  2. lack of focus on women as a market.

However, we need better gender data for more than just the economy. Oxfam conducted a household survey on the gendered effects of the December 26, 2004 tsunami that hit several Asian countries. Women were found to be more severely affected than men. Despite the need for better gender data in the field, it is not always happening. Lack of data on women leads to lack of awareness of issues related to women and consequently, lack of programs designed to tackle those issues.

Survey design can promote non-binary gender inclusion

The problem of gender and data bias gets even more complex when we talk about non-binary genders. Twitter, for example, determines its users’ gender based on data it analyzes from tweets. There are only two gender options: male and female, and users cannot choose to opt out from automatic gender assignment or manually choose their gender. By the simple fact that Twitter is using a gender binary of male/female, individuals who do not identify with a binary (e.g., transgender individuals) or have anatomically mixed sexual characteristics (i.e., intersex individuals) are ignored in the data.

It is important to ask questions about gender on a survey to improve interventions. Instead of restricting gender to a binary, a third option to opt-out or define oneself as ‘other’ can be instituted. When appropriate, additional questions can be used to determine whether practice and self-identification fit into pre-defined categories.

Data must represent local gender categories

It is also important to localize the survey where gender categories and practices may vary. India acts as a good case study for the difficulties in language for demographic purposes. India initially provided three gender options: male, female, and eunuch on its passport forms. However, these three categories marginalized other transgender populations, so in 2014 Indian courts changed the category of ‘eunuch’ to ‘other’ on the election ballots. This simple change in language not only promotes the human rights of India’s non-binary gender individuals, but also provides better data on its non-binary gender communities.

The hijra are a transgender community that has existed in South Asia for over 4,000 years. Along with a few ‘Western’ countries, at least four South Asian countries — Nepal, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh — recognize a third gender in some legal capacity.

Global development is moving forward with programming for non-binary gender communities. The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency put out an action plan for working with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues from 2007-2009. Last year USAID announced its LGBT Vision for Action, a general roadmap of how the donor would support non-binary gender communities. As programming for non-binary gender communities continues and increases, we need to think closely about the language we use and how we collect data on gender to create effective, data-driven interventions.

With development becoming more data driven, the data we collect and the biases we include in the data are having a larger impact. Technology can make these biases more entrenched through features like data validation. Even though data validation is important for survey collection–it limits responses to particular choices or data types (e.g., phone numbers)–it also restricts options based on the choices of the survey creator and can marginalize groups whose identities are not included or allowed as a valid option. Going forward, we need to be careful we are not unintentionally marginalizing other groups or genders with the data we collect.

Interested in engaging in similar conversations around data and tech in M&E? Join us and more than 90 other international development practitioners in our upcoming course on Technology for Monitoring and Evaluation.

On this year’s International Women’s Day, we recognize the important work our alumni and partners are doing to empower women and girls across the world.

At TechChange, there are few areas we see this empowerment happening than in the field of family planning and reproductive health. As we’ve seen in our mHealth online course and community, many organizations are doing fantastic work in this area including the UN Foundation and MAMA, D-Tree International, FHI 360, Jhpiego, John Snow Inc., and more.

We’re hoping to further explore the issue of gender in global development programs and technology in our upcoming online course on Gender.

Use the coupon code, IWD2015, by this Friday, March 13, to get $50 off any TechChange open online course such as mHealth, Mobiles for International Development, Gender, and more.

 

 

Photo source: Amnesty International

In the latest session of TechChange’s “Tech for International Crisis Response and Good Governance” class, I learned about the Panic Button, the emergency Android app recently launched by Amnesty International. The app is a step in the right direction for emergency alert applications, and may prove to be useful in other types of emergency situations. It was initially designed for activists working abroad, and essentially turns a cell phone into an alarm. While the app is running, the user can send pre-programmed SMS and GPS coordinates to three trusted contacts by hitting the phone’s power button multiple times. This simple process can be executed while the phone is located in the activist’s hand or pocket, and with minimal effort. With beta testing in 17 countries, this open source app was developed through an iterative process by networks of developers and activists, with two critical factors in mind: security and speed.

Pros. The speed of sounding an alarm is a major benefit of Panic Button, triggered by the power button on a user-friendly interface. This trigger allows users to be discreet in sending out an S.O.S. before their phone may be taken away by an adversary. Also, the GPS functionality provides trusted contacts with detailed information of where the person (or at least the phone) is located. This notification assumes that the activist has prepared ahead of time to both discuss with their contacts what to do in the event that an S.O.S. is received, and that they have turned the app on.

Cons. Security – particularly the interception of texts – remains a major concern. The app may reveal information about one’s location and contacts that could put all parties at increased risk. One of the major benefits of the app is sharing GPS coordinates, which need to be manually enabled. In an insecure environment, these may typically be switched off. The app needs to be switched on to work, which also means that the user needs to anticipate that they may be in a dangerous scenario – something very hard to do. These stipulations, as well as its learning curve, are potential stumbling blocks that need to be addressed.

Implications for sexual violence prevention. Despite these kinks, the Panic Button is a powerful tool. In its current state, Panic Button is specifically designed for activists, but its technology has the potential for use in other emergency situations, notably for women and girls at risk for sexual violence. Panic Button is similar to the award-winning and widely-used Circle of 6 app, but appears to be easier to use in an emergency situation. The ability to trigger Panic Button’s alarm without having to open the app itself is a critical differentiator and timesaver when an abduction or act of sexual aggression is occurring (similar to a scenario a Panic Button user would face). Circle of 6 is already being used in India, where not only sexual violence occurs on a far-too-frequent basis, but also where users are already comfortable using smart phones, and thus could also easily use Panic Button.

Panic Button is useful in environments that are dangerous and highly variable. With the open source nature of the app, one can only hope that the app will be adapted further to better address more specific challenges presented by additional contexts, and save both activists’ and women’s lives worldwide.

About Jessica Soklow

Jessica Soklow

Jessica Soklow is working toward her Masters in International Affairs at George Washington University’s Elliott School and is alumna of TechChange’s “Tech for International Crisis Response and Good Governance” course. Her concentration at the Elliott School is on international development, with an emphasis on developing and implementing programming with a gender-specific lens. Jessica has conducted extensive research on gender-based violence in international contexts, with a specific focus on prevention mechanisms in both India and the United States. She is optimistic about how technology can be used in the future to help prevent violence on a global scale.

Learn about tools like Panic Button and other technology in our upcoming online course on Tech Tools & Skills for Emergency Management, which has an early bird discount that ends Oct 31!

What does the rise of #YesAllWomen mean for social change?

In our last post on #BringBackOurGirls, we examined whether social media activism could free girls who had been kidnapped in Nigeria. With the rise of #YesAllWomen, it’s worth exploring whether social media can improve the lives of women and men everywhere in shifting social norms around gender.

Less than a week after the killing spree at the University of California Santa Barbara, a torrent of more than two million tweets have been shared containing anecdotes, stories, and outcries against misogyny, sexual harassment, and violence against women.

Topsy YesAllWomen

Source: Topsy

Why has #YesAllWomen gained so much media attention? It can be argued that the #YesAllWomen hashtag has built off continuing momentum of other initiatives that have women (and some men) speaking out against misogyny in its many forms. A provocative article from TIME Magazine in April 2014, nearly a month before the UCSB murders, was a critique of the #NotAllMen argument, setting the stage for women to share how sexual harassment and misogyny are frighteningly common experiences that women face on a regular basis. Foreign Policy’s piece on “What do #YesAllWomen and #BringBackOurGirls have in common?” highlights:

“[…]the global Internet has during the last month seen an incredible outpouring of support for the full equality of women. Even if the two hashtags fail to end misogyny and free the kidnapped schoolgirls, they surely represent a step in the right direction in advocating for a better reality for women.”

Here is a heat map visualizing the use of #YesAllWomen hashtag on Twitter, showing the start of the hashtag in the U.S., in comparison to Nigeria, where the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag began.

Related campaigns using the hashtags #everydaysexism and #rapecultureiswhen have both been used in similar efforts to shed light on misogyny, as discussed in CNN’s article on “Why #YesAllWomen took off on Twitter.” Campaigns across U.S. campuses have also been pressuring universities to address sexual assault on campuses, as mentioned in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

What will be the ultimate impact of #YesAllWomen? Will this social media momentum change ingrained cultural norms of sexism across society? It did, at least for Kenneth Curtis, a man who described his reaction to the #YesAllWomen tweets:

“The courageous voices I saw on #YesAllWomen burst my bubble in all the good ways. They shed a light on my ignorance. They also shed a light on the work we men have to do. This is how change happens. Shed a light on the problem. Now let’s rally to fix it.”

But what about the societies where women cannot speak out as openly on social media due to censorship or lack of access to technology? With #YesAllWomen, social media has succeeded again in being a tool for raising awareness on a social issue, but it will continue to be a long journey to shift entrenched cultural norms.

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Interested in this topic and how social media can be used to create social change? Enroll now in our upcoming Social Media for Social Change course.

Kathy Calvin, President and CEO of UN Foundation. (Photo credit: Johns Hopkins SAIS. Photo by Kaveh Sardari Photography)

Last Friday, the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) launched its second annual Global Women in Leadership Conference with this year’s theme on “Technology in Action: Changing the Way Women Live and Work”. Throughout the day, female leaders spanning various aspects of the tech industry from across the world joined over 300 conference attendees to discuss the growing role of women in technology.

Supporting women in tech has always been important to TechChange and we’ve been excited to work with several organizations in this space. For example, we’ve worked with TechGirls at the State Department, Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA), and partnered with USAID to create a course on Gender in Political Transition Environments. At the conference, it was great to hear from TechChange partners including MAMA’s Executive Director, Kirsten Gagniare, and Christopher Burns, Senior Advisor and Team Lead for Mobile Access at USAID, as they discussed mHealth and mobiles for international development. I found it personally inspiring to meet and hear from all of these female trailblazers in tech from across the world including Roya Mahboob, one of the first female IT CEOs in Afghanistan, and many more women leaders in technology driven industries.

In case you missed the event, here are a few highlights from this conference on women and technology:

  1. Mobile is the future to empowering women worldwide. ICT4D and women’s global access to technology, especially mobile phones, was a strong theme throughout the event. According to keynote speaker, Kathy Calvin, President and CEO of the UN Foundation, there are currently more mobile phones than people in Africa. Also, the gender gap in mobile phone usage is wide: women have 300 million less mobile subscriptions than men.

Mayra Buvinic, Senior Fellow at the UN Foundation discussed how mobile phones empower women with mobility and privacy for financial transactions. A specific example of this empowerment is via M-PESA, which has been championed by women and has become a global model for mobile money, according to Jalak Jobanputra, venture capitalist and Managing Partner of FuturePerfect Ventures. With the excitement of emerging mobile technology, ThoughtWorks CTO, Rebecca Parson, highlighted an important point on how cultural and local context matters in ICT4D. She shared a poignant anecdote on a water project in Africa that was sabotaged by the women of a particular village. The motivation behind this damage was to preserve the already limited external interaction among the females of this community; the water pump technology took away the opportunity for women to interact with each other when they would collectively fetch water for their families.

2. Education is key for women to succeed in tech. In the conference’s final panel on “Leveling the Field: Expanding Economic Opportunities”, panelists shared several resources for women to build up their technical acumen and to get involved in tech communities. Be sure to check out groups and organizations like Tech LadyMafia, Rails Girls, CodeChix, Girls Who Code, and taking online courses with TechChange! Proficiency in tech tools opens up options for women in terms of job opportunities and work arrangements such as telecommuting and flexible work schedules when using collaborative software.

3. Women as consumers and producers of tech will result in products more catered to women. Jennifer Sherman, Senior Vice President of Product Mangement at Aptean, made a strong business case for design teams to consider women when creating new tech products. As tech companies are looking to grow their customer base, they will need to understand what women want as more women want to buy tech products that are specifically designed and built to meet their needs.

What was your favorite takeaway from the conference? How will the world be shaped by women consuming and producing more technology? Let us know your thoughts!

Last Thursday, TechChange was proud to participate in the TechGirls program by inviting two young women from the Middle East to shadow our team during a work day. While we’ve always been committed to tech capacity building in the Middle East, it had been almost two years since we conducted a series of trainings in the West Bank, and we couldn’t pass up a chance to invite future colleagues into our home and share our enthusiasm. According to the State Department, the TechGirls program:

“[P]rovides girls from the Middle East and North Africa with the knowledge and resources to pursue higher education and careers in technology. This program builds on the U.S. global commitment to advance the rights of women and girls around the world.”

Nagham joined us from Nablus, Palestine. She is 16 and started using the computer at the age of 5; and she would like to study IT or Science. Nagham expects to improve her programming and game design skills. Sondos is from Zarqa, Jordan. She is 16 years old and has taken classes in robotics, Visual Basic, Oracle, Invention, Photoshop and HTML and SQL programming. Sondos is especially interested in pursuing technological interests that will aid the field of medicine.

With that in mind, we set up a variety of hands-on workstations that included:

Hands-On Coding and Electronics: Combining Art, Problem-solving, and Circuitry

Screenshot of our office temperature as measured by Arduino sensor.

Python-powered office temperature website

Since both TechGirls were interested in both programming and hardware, we started off with our in-house code ninja, Michael Holachek. Michael is 18, an avid robotics enthusiast, and will be attending MIT in the Fall to study Electrical Engineering. Michael started off with a short discussion about the connection between art and electronics (including a TED talk on painting circuits), introduced some basic programming in C and Python, and then demoed a few cool circuits on the Arduino and Raspberry Pi. They then worked together to make a TechChange mood lamp that played the TechChange theme song and display the office temperature on a website. At the end of the session, Sondos and Nagham came up with several ideas for applying these new skills to new problems, including attaching a room thermometer to an Arduino board to trigger an alert if the room became too hot for a baby.

Making Graphic Elements: Generating and Animating TechGirls Avatars

With their new Arduino boards built, both Nagham and Sondos sat down with Pablo Leon and Rachel Roth to try illustrating themselves and then animating their avatars in After Effects. Rachel provided a sketch of our guests and then we loaded them on our custom tablets for illustration. Trying their hands with our stylus, they learned about creating layers, sorting into folders, using filters, etc.

Illustrated avatars of TechGirls

New avatars illustrated by TechGirls!

After they finished creating avatars, Alon Askarov demonstrated how to use the Puppet tool to teach them how create short animations. Given that we were limited by time and that TechChange animations take time (see our blog post on this), these were kept to minimal facial expressions, but we still had fun doing it!

A brief animated loop of Sondos

Animated Sondos

Designing a Four-Week Course: A Tour of mHealth

Since Sondos was interested in public health projects, we tried to show off what we’d been working on for our mHealth and maternal health initiatives. We opened up the most recent course that we had built with the UN Foundation on Mobile Phones for Public Health,but rather than the speakers or content, what seemed to be the most interesting was the 161 participants in the course from all around the world. We agree: It is pretty cool.

Student map from our mHealth class

Student map from our mHealth class

But on top of the novelty, we also chatted about how we believed connecting these students was a core part of online learning — not just transferring knowledge on technology, but building a community of practice. After all, technology is the easy part when it comes to mHealth.

Building Interactive Learning Experiences in Articulate

TechGirls Articulate screenshot

But a platform isn’t enough for online learning. Catherine Shen discussed how to structure content for educational purposes. This meant walking through the current courses being designed for State Department, USAID, and the World Bank. Catherine used a current course from OTI Lebanon on advocacy for the TechGirls to see the mechanics of course design at work.

The TechGirls then created a short interactive presentation on their TechChange day, integrating their animated avatar with a survey that the girls used to tell us about their experience. Using a Likert scale, the girls gave their impressions of their shadow day.

The results were clear: Both of our participants strongly agreed that the job shadow day was fun and inspiring, in addition to being informative and interactive.

It was for us as well. Thanks to the TechGirls team for joining us!

Funny group picture of TechChange and TechGirls

Thanks TechGirls!

This post was written with contributions from the entire TechChange team. Thanks specifically to Catherine Shen and Michael Holachek for contributions in the sections above.

The first step to closing the ever-widening technology gender gap is getting more young girls excited about technology. This is the goal of the State Department-led TechGirls international exchange program, which connects young girls from the Middle East and North Africa with tech mentors in the US. The three-week program aims to connect and support the next generation of women in tech by providing them with a foundation of skills, experience, and networks that can lead to future career opportunities in technology back in their home communities.

It is no secret that our team is passionate about ensuring global inclusion & understanding of tech applications, so you can imagine that we are incredibly excited to be a part of this years’ TechGirls program. On July 11, we will be hosting two budding female technologists, one from Jordan and the other from Palestine. These young women will get a behind-the-scenes look at our DC nerd attic, shadowing different members of the TechChange team.

This will include spending time with our in-house coding ninja Michael, learning the basics of Raspberry Pi and the “Internet of Things.” At another station, they will meet with our learning experience designer Catherine to get an inside perspective on the life cycle of a TechChange course, from design to reality. Our animation team will lead them through the basics of creating compelling and educational graphics – perhaps even letting them design their own.

Announced in 2011, the TechGirls programs was built on the heels of the first-ever TechWomen mentoring program, which pairs emerging female leaders with top American women in the technology sector. This year’s TechGirls cohort is comprised of 27 girls from eight Middle Eastern countries and the Palestinian Territories, who will gain hands-on skills development in fields such as programming, robotics, mobile app building, web design and video graphics.

 

This guest post is by Sara Buzadzhi a past participant in TC309 Mobile Phones for Public Health. Can’t wait for June 3? Sign up for TC105 Mobiles for International Development launching on March 4th, which will feature a week on public health.

While the use of various mHealth applications and text-messaging services are
surging in both high and low-income countries, Russia has been somewhat behind
the curve in adopting these solutions to address health issues. The Russian NGO I
work for, the Health and Development Foundation, has been striving to change that,
introducing the country’s first national mHealth programs.

This January, HDF launched a new nationwide program for clients considering and
undergoing infertility treatment. This initiative, IVF/ART School uses an innovative
-combination of traditional and mHealth approaches. The target audience, women
and their families, will be reached through a multi-tiered approach including offline
seminars with reproductive health specialists at clinics; social networks, a program
site, and regular, interactive webinars online; and text messages to participants’
mobile phones. This comprehensive approach will enable us to maintain a strong
connection with our target audience, each component informing and reinforcing
program messages, and provide them with multiple chances for interaction with
peers and experts.

Why IVF?

The demographic situation in Russia has been a point of concern for the government
and the general population since birth rates began to decline in the last decade of
the 20th century. Population increases in the last several years have injected some
optimism into the discussion, but state and public organizations are still eager to
do what they can to promote population growth (including monetary incentives for
pregnant women and mothers).

Against this background, the need for easy access to assisted reproductive
technology treatment for couples dealing with infertility issues is clear. In fact, the
Russian government recently announced that infertility treatment would be covered
under the free state insurance starting in 2013.

But while financial support is important, it is also vital that women and couples
seeking treatment, or considering seeking treatment, are well informed as to their
options, and are receiving the emotional support that can greatly influence the
success of infertility treatment. That is where the IVF/ART School can play a key
role; program participants will receive expert, unbiased information and support
from several sources, including their peer group, increasing the likelihood that they
will maintain treatment until reaching a successful outcome.

Text4baby Russia

t4babyHDF’s first national mHealth program was Text4baby Russia, a nationwide maternal
and child health text messaging program that will celebrate its one-year anniversary
this February. Through this program, new and expectant mothers receive
information on caring for their health and the health of their children through free
text messages to their mobile phones. Subscribers receive 1-2 texts per week on topics like nutrition, safety, substance abuse prevention, legal rights, breastfeeding, and more.

Text4baby Russia (SMSmame in Russian) is based on the successful U.S. program
text4baby, but was significantly adapted by HDF and its government and medical
community partners to ensure that the messages meet the specific cultural and
socio-economic needs of its Russian target audience. HDF is currently piloting a
webinar series to address text message topics in greater depth, and plans to launch
the series in early 2013.

We would be happy to hear from any organizations/individuals working in similar
areas, as we have found international collaboration and knowledge sharing (in
forums like the TechChange course we attended, Mobile Phones for Public Health)
to be very helpful in developing and disseminating our work. Follow HDF and their projects on Twitter: @HealthDevtFound @Text4babyRussia @IVFSchoolRussia

This is a guest post by TechChange alumna Julia Nagel.

If you’re interested in learning with TechChange, check out our next course on Mobile Phones for Public Health. Class starts June 3. Apply now

In December 2012, I traveled with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to Zambia and Malawi to shoot videos on women’s health. Armed with three cameras – a Panasonic HMC, a Canon Rebel T3i, and a Canon 5d Mark II – we sought to capture the voices of African women on issues that affect their lives and the lives of countless women in their country: maternal mortality, cervical cancer, and family planning. Why three cameras you might ask? My fellow videographer and I both agreed that while the Panasonic HMC is a highly versatile camera, its look does not compare to that of a nice DSLR.

With the DSLR cameras, colors are more saturated, images are more vivid, and you get a nice crisp focus on your subject (if you’re able to manage how sensitive that camera’s focus ring is) that nicely blurs the background. The DSLR does have two major downfalls though. One, it does not operate well in low light (a major problem during Malawi’s rainy season). Two, there’s no good way to capture audio. Thus, the
Panasonic was used for every shoot alongside the DSLRs.

 

In this video, Joyce Banda – the first female President of Malawi – talks about the importance of women’s health and empowerment, particularly in Africa and in her country. The interview was both inspiring to shoot and to edit. The two cameras we used in this video are the Panasonic HMC for the wide shot, and the Cannon 5d Mark II for the tight shot. The video was edited in Final Cut Pro and the cameras were matched in Final Cut using an incredibly helpful program called Plural Eyes. To read
more about the interview, please visit: www.SmartGlobalHealth.org/JoyceBanda. Also, stay tuned to www.SmartGlobalHealth.org for the additional videos that will be released from our trip, due out in February.