On the relationship between international telecommunications development and global women's poverty

The article discusses the relationship between international telecommunications development and global women's poverty by examining three questions: (1) Who benefits economically from international telecommunications development? (2) Why is women's poverty a peripheral concern in neoclassical economics? (3) How and by whom should women's poverty be defined? By focusing on the World Bank's policies, programs and lending to telecommunications, and women's empowerment since the 1980s, and drawing on the perspectives of the political economy of communication, feminist economics and critical studies of global women's poverty, this article argues that the problem of global women's poverty should be understood in the contexts of an unequal distribution of goods and services across the globe and between men and women, the androcentrism and ethnocentrism of neoclassical economics and the processes of women's poverty and poor women's agency in poverty alleviation at a local level. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2007.]