appropriate way. Drawing on the work of Medhi et al. and others, the team created a text-free code for reporting water-system status [ 1]. Published codebooks removed any suspicion about communication content, and the water manager did not object to receiving specific codified messages pertaining to the water system.

Gender was intentionally obscured in these transactions; women were now able to communicate with men, as well as remain active participants in water management. In many development scenarios, women are excluded when the process transitions from manual to mechanical. In this case, however, women held onto one domain, water, and extended their reach into another, information and communication technology. This is critical, as the impacts of climate change are often most acute at the local level in developing communities, and the negative effects of climate change are most often borne by rural women.

The United Nations ranks women’s
access and control over resources such
as water as crucial to the creation of a
more equitable society, and scholars and
practitioners have established that water
projects in developing communities
are strengthened when women’s effort,
knowledge, and experience are included
[ 2]. Because women in developing
communities are particularly vulnerable
to rapidly depleting and compromised
natural resources, they must participate
in resource use, resource monitoring,
and resource stewardship in order to
have their needs addressed.

This work was not trivial, given the limited exposure the women had to technology and the types of mobile phones they had access to. Old, broken, and counterfeit phones constitute the technology at hand—phones with keys whose letters and numbers have worn off, “Mobiola” phones (instead of Motorola), and phones with many different settings and menus.

Additionally, most of the women
identified themselves as illiterate and
were unable to read or write any of the
numerous languages spoken and written
around them: Arabic, Darija, Tifinagh
(Berber), or French. ( There is scant use
of the Tifinagh script in ICTD. Few
mobile phones support the Tifinagh
language, and older mobile phones do
not support 16-bit Unicode, which is
necessary to display Tifinagh script
and symbols.) Also, direction and letter
shape were confusing to many women,
as Arabic is written and read right to
left and French is written and read left
to right. Some women were able to read
a limited amount of Arabic but owned
phones that did not support Arabic
script. On phones that could support
Arabic script, the device had to be set
to display that language. In order to
display Arabic-script SMS messages,
phone parameters must be set to “full
character support.” (Factory settings
are normally set to “partial character
support,” the minimum required to
display Roman languages.) Without full
character support, an incoming Arabic
text message will either not display at all
or display garbled symbols. On phones
that did not support Arabic script, other
difficulties were evident. Capital Roman
letters look significantly different from
their lowercase counterparts, leading
some women in the workshops to
mistake the letters for two different
alphabets. Likewise, due to the
bidirectional complexities of multiple
languages, suggestions such as “ 8 comes
after 7” were not useful. For some, it was
difficult to discriminate between the
similarly shaped numbers 6 and 9 and
similarly shaped lowercase letters such
as b, d, p, and q.
The mobile form factor lends itself
to shorthand and symbols, which
stymied many women. This convention,
which keeps text messages shorter
and less costly, makes it difficult for
semi-literate and emerging literate
mobile users to “correctly” learn new
words and phrases. SMS messages
often use numbers to represent Arabic
letters and phonemes. Because there
is no direct transliteration of Arabic
words into Latin letters, and neither
Darija nor Berber has a written form,
text messages are often written in
Arabish—a creative, nonstandard,
informal writing style that blends
alphanumeric code and mixed-language
words. Thus, for low-literate users in
oral-language communities, texting
syntax becomes another language
in an already complex linguistic
environment. Despite these barriers,
study participants appeared to have
a well-developed ability to recognize
patterns (e.g., number sequences,
emoticons, design elements) on their
phone screen and in tiny phonebooks
that family members had created
for them. Dodson conducted several
training sessions to help women more
easily navigate their mobile phones.
Participants also learned to identify
letters on phone keypads and on a
chalkboard and how to write their
names, using their stored name on
the phone for reference. To support
the use of SMS, participants devised
a list of short, simple, relevant, easy-
to-understand SMS messages that
included Berber-language phrases for
“call me” or “come home now.” These PH
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Studying the water poster.