Faheem Hussain

• PhD
• Professor at Arizona State University

In this paper, we explore women's use of ICTs in urban Afghanistan in the period between 2015 and 2022 to examine the changing gender dynamics of ICT access and usage in the context of expanding opportunities for women's education and employment (2015–2020) and different forms of crises, including the COVID19 pandemic (2020–2021) and political take...

Marginalization of communities is a global, multidimensional challenge with social, ecological, and economic implications for sustainable futures. Energy systems may be an active component in the creation and perpetuation of marginalization, as well as in its disruption. Therefore, while one of the key goals of undertaking deliberate transitions of...

Collecting relevant and appropriate data when conducting research in the Global South and other resource-constrained environments can be challenging. This is particularly true when the researcher originates from a different country and has different social, cultural, and political beliefs to the research participants. Data collection in such contex...

To better understand the mobility needs of Rohingya refugees with physical disabilities, specifically lower limb impairments, members of the Mobility Aid project team visited Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Interviews and gait analyses with 14 participants were conducted over a three-week period in September 2021. Interviews cove...

Examining disability within the context of displacement is a vital area of study. Additionally, further study of assistive technology devices for refugees with disabilities and those in low-resource settings presents the opportunity to dramatically improve the safety and medical welfare of people with disabilities. Mobility Aid project is a pilot s...

Based on a case study of the lived experiences of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh between 2017 and 2019, this article focuses on displaced people’s digital needs and innovative efforts to navigate the challenges in their situation. The article first discusses the major barriers faced by Rohingya refugees in using various digital devices and platfor...

The primary objective of our exploratory research is to contribute to the ongoing conversation on Digital Afterlife from the lenses of Global South during the COVID-19 period. Digital Afterlife is fast becoming a challenge for our increasingly connected society. Moreover, the situation got worse with the COVID-19 pandemic. The on-going research is...

Using a case study structure, this research-in-progress paper elaborates the struggles of working on a humanitarian project during the Covid-19 period. The authors identify six specific challenges and propose innovations to address each of these challenges. The challenges are the following: supply chain, design of solutions, human resource developm...

The primary objective of our exploratory research is to contribute to the ongoing conversation on Digital Afterlife from the lenses of Global South during the COVID-19 period. Digital Afterlife is fast becoming a challenge for our increasingly connected society. Moreover, the situation got worse with the COVID-19 pandemic. The ongoing research is t...

We are living in a time of unprecedented human displacement both within countries and across international borders. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) notes that the number of displaced populations are on the rise, both internationally and within individual countries, with this resulting in a wide range of significant interna...

Migration, forced mobility, and refugee studies in ICTD and related disciplines have been predominantly focused on the victims' immediate needs, including shelter, food, healthcare, language, and information. This line of work has mostly been devoid of the political background of migration and the victims' future hopes and aspirations, and hence fa...

The goal of this paper is to identify existing literature in the field that encompasses one contemporary crisis and one prevailing developmental implement: refugees, and the use of ICT in the development arena. A total of 35 research studies were identified that address these two topics. In the process, several main themes that dominate the field a...

This paper explores key problems faced by different humanitarian agencies in educating Rohingya refugees from Myanmar seeking asylum in Bangladesh. The first half this research provides an overview of the challenges faced by different refugee communities globally in the Education sector, followed by the relevant ICT interventions. Then, based on ou...

Gender justice and women’s empowerment are both an end and a goal of sustainable development, and information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) policies and monitoring needs to be informed by this understanding. This article draws on research from Afghanistan exploring how women’s empowerment is conceptualised in relation to info...

The primary objective of our research 1 is to contribute to the ongoing conversation on Digital Afterlife through the lenses of Global South. All major works and services on Digital Afterlife are based on western societies' contexts. With increasing number of ICT users in the developing countries, Digital Afterlife challenges have the ominous poten...

The fifth Sustainable Development Goal instituted by the United Nations in 2015 presents a call for gender equality, targeting the elimination of "discrimination, violence, and exploitation against women". We present an analysis of recent conversations within the Information and Communication Technology and Development (ICTD) community aiming to id...

Information Ecology represents a system of people, values, and technologies in a specific local environment. What makes Information Ecology different is that the spotlight is not on the technology but on human activities that are served by technology. As such it could be a powerful lens for understanding, evaluating, and eventually guiding South-So...

The research outlined in this article explored the emergence of new-media-driven citizen participation in Bangladesh against a background of contradictory government policy approaches to the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The government's Digital Bangladesh initiative aims to make ICTs core to citizen empowerment and deve...

Gender inequality has long been on the list of factors that impose limits on the potential of computing, in ways that have been more and less obvious. Drawing on ethnographic findings from marginalized communities in Bangladesh, we analyze the impact of gender inequality on the stages of user research, design, deployment, and use of computing techn...

This paper explores the opportunity of a cooperation and knowledge sharing among the two developing yet promising countries, Bangladesh and Rwanda. Using our own comparative framework and field research data, we critically analyze two specific ICT infused community health services in Bangladesh and Rwanda, and explore whether, under a common compar...

While debates ensue over the role of New Media and social networks in the Arab Spring, the sudden surge in online participation has been noticeably evident, with Twitter, alongside Facebook and blogs, gaining spotlight as a tool that contributed to the momentum of events. In countries where Twitter has been introduced, agitated citizens expressed,...

PurposeIn this study we examine how doing research on gender impacts identity, sense of self, and relation to community; and how fieldwork is mediated by gender structures. Methodology/approachWe draw on feminist epistemology, qualitative methodologies, and critical pedagogies to analyze the fieldwork experiences of 15 women students and nine men f...

Educating women for ICT-based change can be seen as an ICT4D intervention. This paper fills the gap in the literature of capabilities and ICT education for gender equality. This is done by a study of the creation of an undergraduate ICT program for women by a higher education institution in South Asia. It is focused on the qualitative, subjective s...

To develop the rural community and to mitigate the burden of unemployment in Bangladesh, ensuring students participation to run the Information center at micro level could bring a positive change throughout the country. Youth participation could be ensured through the school based information center (SIC). This paper aims at illustrating possible w...

This article looks into the privacy perception and vulnerability among Bangladeshi urban youth using mobile and computing devices. Based on a survey it shows a significant number of the youths are unaware about the concept of privacy in the 'Digital Age' and also has little or no idea about possible risks relating to shared voice and data communica...

Connectivity in social and economic spheres using mobile technology is a global phenomenon. This kind of communication is more significant for Southern Countries: a mean to develop, a way to come out of poverty, and a path towards an equitable society. This relationship between new communication technologies and society is complex, primarily due to...

This paper identifies the major challenges behind the poor performance of the telecommunications licensing regime in Bangladesh. Moreover it explores the negative consequences this emerging economy has to endure in both short and long term future, primarily due to the uncertainties created by the incumbent regulator in mobile phone service renewal...

This research explores the key reasons behind the poor performance of the regulator as well as the policymakers in major Telecom sectors of Bangladesh. Telecommunication industry is considered to be one of the key enablers for the present government’s 'Digital Bangladesh' vision. The government has laid out strategies in important national priority...

This poster focuses on the national level efforts taken in Bangladesh (one of the most climate-vulnerable countries) to face the immediate as well as long term challenges of climate change through green ICT based applications and infrastructure. "Digital Bangladesh" is a vision supported by the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) to integrate the ICT ba...

Since emerging as an independent country in 1971, Bangladesh has achieved some notable development amid major socio-economic challenges. The rapid growth of the telecommunication industry has been a key success story. With some of the world’s lowest tariffs, there are around 70 million active access paths of telecommunications here (with mobile SIM...

This paper introduces a framework to examine the relative effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of different information and communications technologies to deliver a range of social services in rural Bangladesh. It focuses particularly on major sectors like agriculture, education, disaster response and healthcare. Expert elicitation (using both loca...

Community radio (CR) is a participatory medium and a subset of radio broadcasting. It is an inexpensive and popular way for disseminating content (information, news, entertainment, etc.) CR is designed to increase availability of localized information, media access and empowerment, and even market based growth and societal resource distribution for...

Since its inception in 1997, Community Radio (CR) in Nepal has earned wide range acceptability among the masses as an effective community-based medium. This paper critically looks into the issue of ensuring 'sustainability' in Nepalese CR broadcasting. Here, different types of CR management systems in Nepal have been analyzed with the goal of under...