Tim Mwololo

University of Nairobi | UON · School of Computing and Informatics

Climate and weather services support important decision making in many sectors across the Greater Horn of Africa. Though constantly improving, there is a mismatch between the provision of these services and the needs of target stakeholders. To better understand this, we interviewed 23 practitioners who work with climate, weather, and hydrological i...

Impediments to the scale-out of digital services for agriculture (DSAs) exist in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This is despite the promise of these information systems (IS) artifacts to unlock agricultural productivity and outcomes. Existing literature identifies these impediments fortuitously, failing to explain the dimensionality and patterns of asso...

A fragmented digital agriculture ecosystem has been linked to the slow scale-out of digital platforms and other digital technology solutions for agriculture. This has undermined the prospects of digitalizing agriculture and increasing sectoral outcomes in sub-Saharan African countries. We conceptualized an aggregator platform for digital services i...

In previous studies, Knowledge Management (KM) strategies have been examined as objects of organizations, instead of scrutinizing their characteristics or relative quality and content. This study aims to examine the key characteristics of KM strategies in Agricultural Research Organizations (AROs) in East Africa in terms of what exists, what does n...

This paper, seeks to explore how rural communities especially women in Kitui county use ICT tools to access localized climate information and how Digital Capital facilitates or impedes the process. Our view is that the continued access to, and use of, ICT tools like the mobile phone and radios offer diverse opportunities for rural communities to us...

Although the role of ICTs in improving human life in Kenya is acknowledged widely, the focus of much of ICT-related developments has been on human experiences at the level of disease and needs for communication and mobility. Less obvious is how such technological interventions may be used to address seemingly abstract yet grave concerns like climat...

In this paper, we propose that an Integrated Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (I-SLF), that mainstreams ICT-driven climate information, provides the ideal means by which such information may be leveraged to ensure sustainable enhanced livelihoods. We focus on rural areas of Kitui County, Kenya. Guided by a range of theories such as Gender and Deve...

The development and implementation of e-government has been viewed as an opportunity to bring the much-desired reforms in public administration. There are several studies that have been conducted in the field of e-government and many projects implemented in both developed and developing countries signifying a tremendous growth in the field. However...

This article is based on a sequential exploratory mixed research method study that had administered 422questionnairesto smallholder farmers in Machakos County Kenya, interviewed 36 key informants and conducted a semi-structured participant observation between March-June 2013.We found that mobile phones usage in rural livelihoods varied according to...

Characteristic of every developing nation, Kenya has found itself at crossroads; defining the banking industry with the urge to provide banking services to majority of the unbanked populations. Mobile banking is a banking model that has been adopted by Kenyan Banks to reach out to unbanked populations. This paper is based on a case study conducted...

In the tropics, unmonitored land use/cover types cause significant effects on the narrowing and widening of river channels which affects the integrity of water resources. River channel planform extent was characterised using Landsat images while water and bedload samples were collected and analysed for a period of one year. The results revealed tha...

Many countries in the global South are dramatically expanding their broadband infrastructure as part of national plans to use domestic and global connectivity to achieve accelerated social and economic development. This entry reviews recent developments in the expansion of undersea fiber networks connecting with African countries and considers some...

Chronic illnesses to which HIV/AIDS, Malaria and TB is part, have had long term direct impact on the population, social economic status as well as health in general. A lot of commitment by governments, non-governmental organizations, inter-national organizations etc. intended to reduce mortality of these disease. These intentions have not had propo...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of e-waste management practices in Kenya and selected countries. It develops an ideal regulatory framework for e-waste management in Kenya. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology adopted for this paper includes collecting data using interviews, direct observation and literature r...

Research conducted on the poor and their finances indicate that there is a need to develop financial instruments that specifically fit their needs. However, banks have not been able to provide such services, because the returns do not justify the cost of delivering them. The uptake of mobile phones and mobile money (in various guises) in recent yea...

Abstract: With a 75% mobile penetration in Kenya, there has been a flurry of efforts to develop mobile applications for the common citizen who now owns a mobile device. However, the uptake of such mobile phone-based applications has been disappointingly low, especially at the so-called base of the pyramid (BoP). This paper examines the development...

Statistics from the Communication Commission of Kenya (2013) show that mobile data/Internet subscriptions dominate the Internet market. It contributes 99% of the total Internet subscriptions, with 16.2 million Internet users countrywide as at the end of 2012. Kenya has thus witnessed a spectacular growth in mobile phone usage with mobile Internet p...

Purpose – Use of e‐mail, the internet and mobile phones, collectively referred to as the “new technologies” in this paper, is influenced by various factors in low‐income households. These factors, which range between individual, social, economic, environmental, cultural and knowledge, have not been explored fully, particularly in low‐income househo...

This paper describes a prototype case-based reasoning expert system that enables farmers to get assistance with crop diagnostics and other extension services through the web via a dynamic website or through mobile phones. It is also voice enabled to support visually impaired people. Mobile Interfaced Crops Diagnosis Expert System (MICDES) was motiv...

Mobile phones with Mobile Commerce technology are becoming more readily available in Kenya. Similarly many financial institutions and mobile phone service providers are teaming up to provide banking services to customers via the mobile phone. However the number of people who choose to adopt or use such technologies is still relatively low. Therefor...

Purpose Usage of internet and mobile phones has promoted and sometimes hindered various aspects of development bringing radical changes to Kenyan households in the last couple of years. The rapid spread of mobile phones, mobile broadband and internet usage at the household level has increased the potential of these technologies leading to developme...

This article describes how the VeSeL project which involves a distributed team of technologists and users from different cultural backgrounds is attempting to manage the process of user involvement and participation. In this case the developers are distributed but linked by a number of communication technologies while the users have very few techno...

This article describes how the VeSeL project which involves a distributed team of technologists and users from different cultural backgrounds is attempting to manage the process of user involvement and participation. In this case the developers are distributed but linked by a number of communication technologies while the users have very few techno...

In this paper we try to investigate potentials of mobile technology use between the Kenyan government and its citizens. On this account the paper will interact with supply and demand side practices of e-governance specifically in Kenya, although drawing from global circumference. From the supply side, we look at Kenya's current e-governance practic...

There is very little concrete empirical evidence of the effects of ICT on governance and how these effects should be evaluated. This paper is based on an e-governance outcome evaluation framework that draws on the existing literature on e-government, good governance and results-based management. Data was collected through surveys, key informant int...

We describe our approach and initial results in the participatory design of technology relevant to local rural livelihoods. Our approach to design and usability proceeds from research in theory and practice of cross-cultural implementations, but the novelty is in beginning not with particular technologies but from community needs, and structuring t...

The authors present participatory customisation as a way forward to implement information and communication technologies (ICT) in the developing world. This is achieved by describing an ongoing project of universities in the UK and Kenya aimed at supporting rural farmers as well as presenting experiences from previous ICT implementations for social...

The role that information and communication technologies (ICT) could play in socio-economic development has been recognized by governments worldwide. The most important starting point in most countries is a national ICT policy. In many developing countries, ICT policy development has increasingly become a participatory process. This is largely as a...

The potential for ICT to positively contribute to good governance has been known for a long time and has been the subject of many articles and reports, but very little concrete empirical evidence of the effects of ICT on governance, and how these effects should be evaluated, exist. The situation is even worse when we consider ICT and governance in...

In Africa, where we have enormous and varied challenges in accessing higher education, there is need for relevant and customized content that is specific to our needs and challenges. Most of the models that exist to address these challenges have their limitations in terms of flexibility, time and space constraints and hence the need to address the...

The formation and implementation of strategy with respect to computer-based information systems (IS) are important issues in many contemporary organizations, including those in the financial services sector. This paper describes and analyzes an in-depth case study of the strategy formation and implementation process in one such organization, a medi...

In developing countries computer-based information systems (CBIS) initially tend, in general, to be literally ''implanted'' into complex social contexts in organizations. If effectively used, they acquire institutional character and become inextricably entwined with these contexts. For instance, they become inseparable from human judgments and acti...

This paper describes a case study of information systems strategy formation in a developing country bank over a five-year period. The methodological approach to the research combined a focus on the process of organizational decision making with analysis of the linkages between this process and the organizational and wider contexts. The case was cha...

Information systems in organisations can be viewed as social systems and the formulation of IS strategy as a social process. Alternative formulation models have been based on formal-rational or power-behavioural approaches, but here we propose a holistic analysis involving the context, content and process of strategy formulation. Some aspects of th...

Computer‐based information systems should be conceptualised as social systems in which technology is only one of the dimensions. This broader perspective on information systems offers opportunities for a deeper understanding of their development and use. The social systems approach is illustrated in the paper by two research projects in the UK on t...

Existing designs modeled in the developed countries assume a user who is sophisticated, has experience with Graphical User Interfaces and is therefore able to conceptualize and contextualize interactions and is literate. However, the case in Africa is markedly different, especially in the rural areas where literacy levels are low and technology is...

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have increasingly become crucial to achieving organizational and strategic goals. This has led to an ever increasing expenditure on ICT and an accompanying increasing demand to measure the business value of the IS investment. The need to evaluate investments in ICT projects is further exacerbated by...

______________________________________________________________________________________ Abastract: The implementation of Information Systems (IS) in the higher education learning institutions in Kenya has been increasing and seen varied results. Research has reported higher chances of IS failures in developing countries. The organizational implement...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Cambridge, 1990.