Entrants's Name: Sheau Ching Chong

Country: Malaysia

Field: Citizen/Community Participation

Innovation - idea: eHomemakers is dedicated to use ICT for economic empowerment through advocacy, training, research, and information sharing for the benefit of homeworkers, home- based entrepreneurs and homemakers. It carries out activities to bridge the digital divide for the disadvantaged through a project that provides specialized trainings as well as marketing services and personalized assistance. http://www.ehomemakers.net/en/aboutus.php? id=1

Innovation - why it is pioneering: We use ICT to organize a digital divide community with little status to gain social acceptance by promoting awareness to our socia-economic contribution, gender prejudice and the unrecognized informal sector. It is the only online space in Malaysia and ASEAN for the community. We’ve pioneered a e-business model for urban poverty alleviation by promoting creative partnerships with parties.http://www.ehomemakers.net/en/index.php, http://www.justmarketing.info

Strategy - how it achieves impact: eHomemakers is managed by grassroot for grassroot through a virtual office. We provide a self-help platform through publications, portal and ground events for teletrading, training, networking, information empowerment and clusters- to-clusters assistance. Our research findings give concrete evidence to advocacy. Advocacy activities and media events promote our messages about the plight of the group, value chain exploitation in the informal sector and women's right to choose. Creative partnerships are formed between the information haves and have-nots, and women with various skills/talents to facilitate viable homebusinesses, supply chains and marketing networks. The disadvantaged situated in diverse locations participate in e-businesses through a web to handphone/fax integrated platform to form into an efficient supply chain and empowerment network with low management costs. eHomemakers organizes and grows the community by promoting family and ethical values. Link: http://www.ehomemakers.net/en/article.php?id=1447

Strategy - growth plans: I am sourcing for funds and corporate partnerships to grow the membership in Malaysia especially for the poor through collaborative activities with members’ e-businesses and skill-specific marketing and supply chains. Ultimately, we want to reach the rural poor Chinese women in New Villages and the Indian women in the plantation communities. Our urban poverty alleviation model using ICT and partnership between the information haves and have- nots can be replicated in other ASEAN countries. The in- country communities can be linked together in an ICT platform with eHomemakers.net as the umbrella. Such a regional platform, coupled with research for advocacy, will be a strong force to advocate for homeworkers’ rights, protection and ICT4D assistance besides giving an ethical space where the communities can teletrade and upport each other. The creative partnerships will promote viable e-businesses, forming a formidable working@ home force that changes legislation and policies.

Impact to date: eHomemakers has grown 13,000 members who embark on various working @ home initiatives. Some are successful but most are still learning how to balance home and work life besides overcoming personal challenges. It is a life-long learning experience that empowers them one step at a time. We’ve inspired other similar initiatives by various state governments for unemployed youths and disabled. Several Muslim women have also set up similar initiatives to reach the Muslims, and a few single moms have started their own working @ home groups. Through our “ICT and Homeworkers in South-East Asia’ research, we have convinced our partner institutions to embark on advocacy for ICT4D for homeworkers. Our Thai partner has managed to get the Thai government to use ICT4D as a poverty alleviation tool in its national agenda. The working@ home movement has spread to a few NGOS in Nigeria, India, Bosnia, Cambodia, Guatemala, and Indonesian Acheh, all of which have requested for eHomemakers help. http://www.ehomemakers.net/en/article.php? id=773 , http://www.ehomemakers.net/en/article.php? id=774, http://www.ehomemakers.net/en/category.php?id=44, http://www.ehomemakers.net/en/article.php? id=1256

Future impact: Malaysia will have recognized the informal sector and the social-economic contribution of the community. Poverty alleviation through social enterprise principles will be accepted widely by then. eHomemakers’ large membership will affect changes in the character of the informal sector and how businesses act in the value chain. A grassroot voice for ethical treatment of micro/homebased businesses and homeworkers will foment a sustainable business environment for the community, afforded by the usage of low-cost ICT tools and connection. The community will participate in Fair Trade. Members will form more networks and manage the networks for themselves, leading to gender governance, a framework propounded by eHomemakers for social-economic empowerment. Gender governance will drive governance in others. The model will be a viable example of how the burden of poverty alleviation can be lifted from the state, reducing reliance on government and social assistance and enabling self-reliance.

Sustainability - resource base: We’ve grown with the help of grants and award funds. In order to build sustainability we are now concentrating on creating partnerships with corporations and encouraging them to integrate corporate social responsibility into their procedures and plans. A percentage of the revenue generated from selling disadvantaged women’s products through Fair Trade will be reinvested in the Salaam Wanita project to make it self-sustaining. The women themselves receive at least 50% of the revenue and the remainder goes to administrative and marketing costs.  A number of local volunteers help us to reduce staff costs, additional non-monetary assistance from overseas partners (AP) help with our outreach efforts for funding.

Major challenge for the field:  Difficult to get funding in a region that seems developed to outsiders, even though the development they see is far from evenly distributed and resources are fewer than assumed by outsiders  Much focus on violence against women, overlooking the many (equally important) economic and social challenges they face  Challenge in convincing locals that working @ home should be officially recognized

Contact Information:

Name: Ms Sheau Ching Chong - Executive Director
Country: Malaysia
Website: www.ehomemakers.net, www.justmarketing.info

Bio: Having graduated from Canada and the US, Chong Sheau Ching has two Bachelors’ degrees in Agriculture and Home Economics, majoring in food and nutrition. She also has a Master’s in International Administration. Her fourteen years’ experience with international organizations in policy planning, program¬ming, management and training has given her extensive knowledge on social issues, grassroot empowerment and cross-cultural communication.

As a speaker, columnist in The Star (Malaysia’s most popular English paper), author and trainer, she has been actively involved in community empowerment and poverty alleviation programs. She has been a policy planner and a gender/poverty alleviation consultant for some UN country programs in the Asia Pacific. She believes in personal development at an individual level.

Sheau Ching has authored Stories for My Mother (a collection of short stories on social issues and cross- cultural communication), co-authored and edited ‘Working @ Home- A Guidebook for Working Women and Homemakers” (a precise guidebook on homepreneurship and teleworking), and wrote chapters in several management publications.

She has also founded a community network of women who work from home, “Mothers for Mothers/eHomemakers”. Sheau Ching is presently heading a community trilingual portal ‘www.ehomemakers.net’ which has an e-membership of 13,000. The ‘Working@Home’ cause is her passion. She was awarded the 2003 Women in Electronic Network Training Award (WENT Award) at the World Summit for Information Society, Geneva, Switzerland by APC (Association of Progressive Communication Network) and Sookmyung Women’s University, South Korea, for founding the working @ home network and growing it into a vibrant community. She is also an active contributing member of several international women in ICT networks.

Under Sheau Ching, the eHomemakers network and its pilot marketing website for disadvantaged women ‘www.justmarketing.info’ have won two international award grants for research in competition rounds: the “Pan Asia Networking Grant 2002”, and the “Pan Asia R/D Small Grant 2003”. In October 2005, eHomemakers was the runner- up for the Gender and ICT Award, sponsored by the Association for Progressive Communications Women's Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP) and the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP).

Sheau Ching has brought a local community network of homemakers and homeworkers, which did not have social status and any form of acknowledgement, to national and international recognition with their efficient and quality output and services. eHomemakers is now heading a research on ICT and homeworkers in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia for the International Development Research Center based in Ottawa, Canada.

After nine years of advocacy to the Malaysian government, eHomemakers’ has finally convinced the cabinet to adopt working @ home for women and disadvantaged persons. Sheau Ching is now the only NGO representative in the national committee to draw up guidelines for setting up home offices in Malaysia.

Sheau Ching is a single mother with a home office. She takes care of her 11- year old daughter, a Down Syndrome brother and her 74-year old parents.