Research explores the impacts of mobile phones for Maasai women

Date:
August 6, 2020
Source:
Virginia Tech
Summary:
For a population that herds livestock across wide stretches of wild
savanna, mobile phones are a boon to their economy and life. But
few studies have investigated how this new technology is impacting
the lives of women in Maasai communities, which are traditionally
patriarchal. In family units where men exert significant control,
often over multiple wives, it is important to understand how phones
have impacted gender dynamics.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Mobile phones have the power to change the lives of women living in remote communities by reducing barriers to information and increasing access to
local economies. However, the introduction of new technologies can hamper efforts to empower women by increasing disparities in power dynamics.


========================================================================== Associate Professor Timothy Baird of the College of Natural Resources and Environment and Kelly Summers, who earned a master's degree in geography
from Virginia Tech in 2019, led a National Science Foundation-funded
study examining the impact that mobile phones are having in Maasai
communities in Tanzania.

Their findings, published in the Journal of Rural Studies, reveal crucial insights into the ways that technology impacts social dynamics in a
distinct community in Africa.

A nomadic people adapt to a changing world The Maasai are an ethnic
group of approximately 2 million people, living primarily in Kenya and Tanzania. As one of a number of indigenous groups in Africa to practice pastoralism, which involves the rearing of livestock, the Maasai have traditionally been nomadic, traversing the continent's Great Rift Valley
to find grazing land for their animals.

This way of life, which has sustained Maasai for centuries, is evolving
rapidly with the widespread expansion of western society and the ideas
and technologies that come with it.

"Maasai are moving into a world some might call 'modern,'" noted Baird,
a faculty member in the Department of Geography who has been researching
Maasai communities since 2005. "Already there are aspects of our own
'western' lives that are evident in their lives. For example, several developments in Maasai society, from the growth of formal education to
the spread of organized religion, have led to changes in the traditional structures that shape Maasai lives. From my vantage, mobile phones
have been a kind of steroid for accelerating those changes." For a
population that herds livestock across wide stretches of wild savanna,
mobile phones are a boon to their economy and life. But few studies have investigated how this new technology is impacting the lives of women
in Maasai communities, which are traditionally patriarchal. In family
units where men exert significant control, often over multiple wives,
it is important to understand how phones have impacted gender dynamics.



==========================================================================
"As a man, it's difficult -- and really not appropriate -- for me
to have meetings with individual women or groups of women," Baird
explained. "Maasai men may be quite uncomfortable with such a setup,
and Maasai women may have no experience engaging with a man who is
not a relative. So I needed help." Enter Kelly Summers, who received bachelor's degrees in natural resources conservation and in forestry
from Virginia Tech in 2014.

"While I was serving as an agriculture Extension agent with the Peace
Corps in Tanzania, I read an article about Tim's research and reached
out to him about doing graduate work in Tanzania," said Summers,
who is currently working as an environmental protection specialist
for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "Because I had experience interacting with women while living in and traveling to remote communities
in Tanzania, it was a good fit." Summers, working with collaborators, including Maria Elisa Christie, director of women and gender in
international development for Virginia Tech's Center for International Research, Education, and Development, was able to conduct interviews
with Maasai women, trying to puzzle out the difficult question of what
women's empowerment might look like in a cultural context bounded by
traditions but also stimulated by an expanding world.

"I don't want to paint a monolithic picture of a whole group of people," Summers said. "All of the women I spoke with had multiple identities
within their communities: some women owned businesses, and some took
on the work of tending to livestock. They were mothers and wives. Some
were teachers and some were active in churches. There are a range of identities, and phones impact those identities for better or worse,
or both." Understanding the contexts of empowerment


==========================================================================
To understand how a new technology like mobile phones could potentially
support women's empowerment, it was important for researchers to
understand what empowerment would look like within the specific contexts
of Maasai life.

"To unpack this idea of empowerment, we had to characterize our terms and
then look for examples of those characterizations," Baird said. "We had
to ask: what are the aspects of your social world, what are the physical materials, and what are your own personal assets that allow you to make decisions and then act on those decisions. From that, we could develop
more targeted questions about issues that embody empowerment and the
factors that promote or obstruct it." For Maasai women, the barriers
to using mobile phones to gain empowerment vary: from access to reliable electricity to technological fluency and literacy, to having the financial resources to pay for data, their ability to use phones is shaped by a
broad array of issues that are themselves in a state of radical flux. The
study results show that some concerns are unique to Maasai communities,
while others seem universal.

"One observation we made was that Maasai women are very much addicted
to their phones," Summers explained. "If they can't get a charge or
they can't purchase minutes, the feeling they have is very similar to
our own anxiety when our phones lose power. We all want to communicate,
we all want to be in a community, and phones are becoming a major tool
to do that among Maasai women.

Those who don't have access to a phone very much feel that they're
missing out." To work around some of the challenges pertaining to access, Maasai women have found cooperative solutions. Baird and Summers cite the important role that informal village community banks play in allowing
women to develop business relationships with other women outside their
family units, increasing the women's economic autonomy.

While mobile phones are a positive motivator in seeking these burgeoning opportunities, the authors stressed that mobile phones can also reinforce inequalities. For Maasai women, who typically have multiple roles within
family and community structures, mobile phones can simultaneously empower
an individual in one role while disempowering her in another.

"The same power dynamics that already existed are now playing out with
phones," Baird said. "We found that men, the traditional gatekeepers
in this society, are the ones who often control women's phones. They
can use them as a reward or a punishment, a carrot or a stick."
Summers added that one of their findings is that Maasai men and women
used phones differently: "Men will use their phones to talk to people
outside their immediate social circle, but women will primarily talk
to people they already know: mothers and sisters and other people in
their family unit. They are rarely using their phones to reach out to
new people." While mobile phones can be used in ways that empower women,
the researchers stress that it is more realistic to view this technology
as a new arena where tensions between traditional cultural norms and
the growing aspirations to engage in a broadly interconnected world
continue to play out. Future efforts aimed at using mobile technologies to advance women's empowerment need to better understand what empowerment
would look like within the specific contexts of a distinct culture,
and what consequences -- positive and negative -- are risked when new technologies take root.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Virginia_Tech. Original written by
David Fleming. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


==========================================================================


Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200806122815.htm

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