2013 VOF Week 1

What excites me most about Web 2.0 is the ability to connect not only to people around the world but also to opportunities. Critical masses, shared experiences and learning are key to the growth of the global women’s empowerment movement. Web 2.0 provides women all over the world with means to connect, organize, share experiences , support each other, draw strength from each other the list is endless.

What I consider as an important contribution on my part to the global women’s empowerment movement is supporting girls in slums in breaking the poverty cycle. Having been born and bred in a slum, where opportunities for growth are limited and chance of being entrapped in a cycle loom large. Web 2.0 tools give us a chance to transcend the circumstances we are born into by connecting to opportunities and people who are willing to give us a fighting chance out.
Using the online tools has provided me with an opportunity to connect with the world to tell the slum story in a way that does not reduce us to mere vessels of need but authors of our own destiny. In a TED Talk titled “Retelling the Slum Story.” I wanted to implore the world to see the part of a slum that goes beyond the open sewers, crowed spaces and at times crushing poverty to the little struggle to come out of poverty and a need to give us a fighting chance.

There have been moments of success and I am hoping by taking part in this training, I able to connect with a thousand of women working toward a world beyond poverty and mostly importantly figure out how to connect thousands of women in slums with opportunity to break the poverty cycle and support them in their role to do so.