Nancy Hafkin

"So much of what constitutes underdevelopment is marked by isolation and lack of resources. Simply put, networking means an end to isolation and access to resources that were formerly unavailable. It opens doors and leads to avenues that were closed to most people, especially those in developing countries."

"Women invest their earnings in the family. Women are half of the resources of the world – if a country doesn’t invest in its female resources, it loses half of the productivity it might have."

"One of the biggest problem areas was government policy and regulations that constrained communication, set artificially high communication charges, especially for long-distance, import and control restrictions on satellite communication and on computer and computer communication equipment leading to its unavailability (all of us involved in early networking projects in Africa have our personal stories of smuggling in modems in purses and checked baggage). At the level of planners and decision-makers, there was widespread skepticism about whether this was needed in Africa, when there were so many basic needs to be met."

"I think I was born a feminist. I was the fourth-generation of female breadwinners on my mother’s side, and I came from a family of two daughters. There wasn’t much possibility that the girls in our family would get second-class treatment. I was rather shocked when I first encountered overt sexist bias at university (this was in the Boston area of the US in the early sixties), especially in history, which was my major."