The international NGO Camfed, the Campaign for Female Education, has collaborated with Google to set up a network of three ICT centers that will reach some of the poorest and most remote rural areas of Ghana.

The women-run ICT centers will act as “hubs for learning, communication and entrepreneurship.” They will be located in the northern region of Ghana and the first will open later this month in the town of Bimbila.

Camfed’s mission is to fight poverty and HIV/AIDS in Africa by educating girls and women so that they can become leaders of change. The organization’s head of enterprise and leadership, Catherine Boyce, explained to EWeek Europe that because women in Ghana have few employment opportunities and are pressured to marry young, the female center managers will serve as “powerful role models” to the center’s clients.

Google has pledged to fund the ICT centers during the first two years of operations and while the centers get established with computers, printers, photocopiers and digital cameras. Though Camfed originally thought it would need to rely on solar energy to provide power to the centers, and may explore solar options on a case-by-case basis, the project will likely be able to use electricity since the power supply in Ghana has improved in recent months.

Development projects aimed at educating rural women through the use of ICTs are becoming more prevalent and take many forms. A successful Gates Foundation farm radio project taught women farmers about a drought and disease-resistant rice variety which greatly improved the income of farmers in the area.

Studies have shown that rural women in Africa face many challenges in gaining access to ICTs, such as affordability, distance, and time. Thus simply providing ICTs such as computers and Internet alone will not improve the lives of rural women. Rather, projects must provide low-cost options that contain a strong capacity-building component, such as education, in order to be successful. The Camfed/Google project in Ghana hopes to see success in improving the lives of rural women by providing free access and training in ICTs.