Musimbi Kanyoro: Women, Water and Technology.

This is a foundation that seeds and supports women’s rights organisations across the globe. And Kanyoro is a particularly strong advocate for the rights and empowerment of young women.The focus of this address in Adelaide is women and technology, or more specifically women, technology and the more fundamental, access to water.She describes that the river that was the sole source of water for her family is now dried up and dead, having a profound impact on her family village, but that she can now easily contact her mother by mobile phone from Geneva.Villagers use their mobiles to do their banking, but they still don’t have access to clean water.Water and technology, says Kanyoro, will shape the future in the third world. And until access to clean water is addressed, women, and particularly African women, will remain the most disadvantaged.”Water and technology will define who drops out and who’ll succeed; they’ll define accelerated change or stagnation,” she says.Musimbi Kanyoro is speaking at the Hawke Centre at the University of South Australia. Along with her work for the Global Fund for Women, she is a linguistics scholar and a visiting scholar of Hebrew and the Old Testament at Harvard.