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Considering failure: Eight years of ITID research
Abstract
This paper examines forty articles published in the journal Information Technologies & International Development between 2003 and 2010 in an effort to identify commonalities among projects that failed to meet some or all of their development objectives. We considered whether the selected papers articulated clear development objectives, and whether baseline data was used to inform project design. We then considered two factors associated with how development objectives are implemented: the development perspective (top-down vs. bottom-up), and the project focus (the technology vs. the community). Our goal was not to find fault with our colleagues or their work, rather to advance the debate about the effectiveness of ICTD initiatives at a particularly important point in the history of the discipline. We conclude that top-down, technology-centric, goal-diffuse approaches to ICTD contribute to unsatisfactory development results. Careful consideration of development objectives, perspective and focus is essential in all phases of an ICTD project, from design to deployment. Honest and comprehensive reporting of failure (and success) helps ICTD researchers and practitioners focus on best practices in meeting critical development needs.
... However, while the amount of investment in ICT4D suggests an impressive optimism for ICT4D projects, the reality is that the majority of these initiatives fail. In a literature review of 40 peerreviewed papers from the Information Technologies & International Development journal Dodson et al. (2013) found that '70% of the papers examined referred to or reflected on some level of failure or unintended negative outcome related to the use, uptake or adoption of ICTs in developing communities ' (p. 23). ...
... 'Technology-centric research places the ICT at the center of the intervention, giving prominence to interface features, design elements, etc., while community-centric research emphasizes and is responsive to community-identified needs' (Dodson et al., 2013, p. 23). In examining the ICT4D literature, Dodson et al. (2013) found that 48% of papers that they reviewed appeared to focus on a technological solution to a perceived problem while 33% of papers were centred on the needs of a particular community. The remaining 20% applied a blend of technology-centric and community-centric approaches (Dodson et al., 2013). ...
... In examining the ICT4D literature, Dodson et al. (2013) found that 48% of papers that they reviewed appeared to focus on a technological solution to a perceived problem while 33% of papers were centred on the needs of a particular community. The remaining 20% applied a blend of technology-centric and community-centric approaches (Dodson et al., 2013). ...
Many ICT4D projects fail. Researchers attribute this failure partly to the mismatch between the context in which ICTs are designed and the context of their use. This study aims to understand the interplay between design and ICT4D by (1) making an inventory of design principles across three themes: problem framing, design approach, and team composition, and (2) assessing design statements (distilled from the list of design principles) through a two-round Delphi study with a group of ICT4D researchers and practitioners. The results show that while there is a general awareness of the importance of design in ICT4D, a consolidated effort to investigate how design principles can be more effectively integrated with ICT4D is missing. The study further concludes that there is a shift towards co-designing, that it is difficult to design without pre-determined ideas of using ICTs/emerging technologies and that transdisciplinary collaboration has not yet flourished.
... However, empirical work provided largely inconclusive evidence for either approach. For example, IS studies repeatedly report high failure rates of centralised strategies (i.e., Dodson et al., 2013), concluding that ICTenabled national development should be decentralised (Chaudhuri, 2012). On the contrary, decentralised strategies have been linked to political conflict of local elites (Khaleghian, 2004), may fail due to lacking technical skills (Mauro et al., 2017) or promote inequality across regions (Sumah et al., 2016). ...
... The first literature stream explores, emphasises and promotes the engagement of international donors, NGOs and national governments in ICT-enabled national development, arguing these actors are best suited to foster the diffusion of ICTs within developing nations. Concepts such as top-down (Dodson et al., 2013), technology transfer (Braa et al., 1995) and ICT diffusion (Shih et al., 2008) are synonymously used to describe and support centralised strategies for ICT-enabled national development (Avgerou, 2008). Specifically, studies that promote centralisation highlight improvements in national technology readiness (Lee et al., 2011), enhanced business climate (Dedrick et al., 2013) and higher socio-economic development (World Bank Group, 2011) as its key advantages. ...
... Conversely, the second literature stream explores, emphasises and advocates the engagement of local actors in ICT-enabled national development, arguing that their ability to understand local needs is key to success (Brown & Thompson, 2011). Concepts such as bottom-up (Dodson et al., 2013), social-embeddedness (Avgerou, 2008) and contextualism (Wiredu, 2012) are synonymously used to describe decentralised initiatives as the more successful and sustainable strategy. However, empirical studies have demonstrated that decentralised ICT-enabled national development often produces outcomes that contradict what was initially promised. ...
Are centralised or decentralised strategies more suitable to address a developing nation's socio‐economic challenges through information and communication technology (ICT)? We respond to this long‐standing question by conceptualising ICT‐enabled national development as a multi‐level social process and by drawing on empirical findings from a natural experiment set in the context of health information system projects in Indonesia. Our study demonstrates that successful ICT‐enabled national development is not contingent on pursuing one strategy or the other but on how micro‐level actors interpret, and subsequently respond to, these strategies and the local changes they trigger. Our findings indicate that centralisation and decentralisation are complementary rather than competing strategies to ICT‐enabled national development because, if integrated into a hybrid strategy, decentralisation enables local communities to achieve national development outcomes commonly attributed to centralisation. As such, our work provides empirical evidence, explanations and new theoretical insight into the wider ‘centralisation versus decentralisation’ debate, while also outlining avenues for future research and guidelines for policymakers.
... The literature on ICT for development (ICT4D) attributes the often-disappointing performance of digital information services to 'design-reality gaps': design processes for new information services are often centred around specific technologies and informed by strong technological rationality (Heeks, 2002). As a result, the features of new ICT4D services tend to be based on flawed assumptions about the reality of users, including their information needs and technology use preferences (Dodson et al., 2013;Masiero, 2016). These experiences suggest that: Firstly, the development of digital advisory applications should be based on co-design with diverse future users to develop solutions that address the needs and perspectives of local stakeholders (user-centredness). ...
... This is a recent development: in the past, many digital information services in low-and middle-income countries were created by technology enthusiasts with a promising idea. Often, funding came from international donors, which demanded a well-planned service design before paying for its implementation (Dodson et al., 2013). This focus on proof-of-concept studies has caused many novel services to suffer from overly rigid pre-planning, where developers determined the technological options prior to intense interaction with the targeted user groups. ...
... This focus on proof-of-concept studies has caused many novel services to suffer from overly rigid pre-planning, where developers determined the technological options prior to intense interaction with the targeted user groups. Such rigid pre-planning has frequently hindered subsequent, flexible adaptation of the original ideas in interaction with prospective users, and thus contributed to failure (Dodson et al., 2013;Heeks, 2002). In practice, however, new insights about local information needs, user preferences, and capacities often arise during the design process and challenge the initial assumptions. ...
Agricultural extension in the Global South can benefit greatly from the use of modern information and communication technologies (ICT). Yet, despite two decades of promising experiences, this potential is not fully realized. Here, we review the relevant research literature to inform future investments into agricultural information services that harness the full potential of digital media. We describe a recently emerging innovation agenda that is, in part, a response to the eventual failure of many new agro-advisory initiatives. One important cause of failure has been a focus on pushing certain technologies, rather than responding to the particular communication challenges of potential users. To avoid such bias in designing new services, the new innovation agenda rests on two major foundations: strong user-centeredness and problem-orientation. In our review, we first describe how user-centered design methods help in specifying both problems and (digital) solutions in agricultural extension. To inform responses to the communication challenges defined by that analysis, we then describe eight emerging aspects of using ICT for development, and how they can address common deficiencies of agricultural extension. Practical examples from the literature highlight the possibilities and limitations of these innovation directions. Beyond digital design, however, technological innovation requires enabling institutions.
... ICTD as a field of research has grown rapidly (Gomez, 2013) and multiple studies have attempted to consolidate the emerging body of research to understand its key trends and challenges. Using content analysis and descriptive statistics, these studies have sought to examine (a) the notion of development operationalized in the papers (Chipidza & Leidner, 2019;Gomez, 2013); (b) development and impact of technology artifacts and interventions (Chepken et al., 2012;Dodson, Sterling, & Bennett, 2013); (c) the commonalities among the various ICTD projects that failed to achieve their stated development goals (Dodson et al., 2013); (d) diversity in terms of geographical location and domains of study (Kano & Toyama, 2016;Marathe et al., 2016); (e) methodologies adopted (Gomez, 2013;Lwoga & Sangeda, 2019) and (f) review of extant research and future directions (Chipidza & Leidner, 2019;Heeks, 2010;Walsham, 2017). These studies essentially describe the intellectual dimension of the body of literature focussing on what has been studied and published. ...
... ICTD as a field of research has grown rapidly (Gomez, 2013) and multiple studies have attempted to consolidate the emerging body of research to understand its key trends and challenges. Using content analysis and descriptive statistics, these studies have sought to examine (a) the notion of development operationalized in the papers (Chipidza & Leidner, 2019;Gomez, 2013); (b) development and impact of technology artifacts and interventions (Chepken et al., 2012;Dodson, Sterling, & Bennett, 2013); (c) the commonalities among the various ICTD projects that failed to achieve their stated development goals (Dodson et al., 2013); (d) diversity in terms of geographical location and domains of study (Kano & Toyama, 2016;Marathe et al., 2016); (e) methodologies adopted (Gomez, 2013;Lwoga & Sangeda, 2019) and (f) review of extant research and future directions (Chipidza & Leidner, 2019;Heeks, 2010;Walsham, 2017). These studies essentially describe the intellectual dimension of the body of literature focussing on what has been studied and published. ...
... Thus, a significant proportion of papers presented at this venue looked at design development of technology artifacts, field experience, and best practices (Dodson et al., 2013; Gomez, 2013). However, as pointed by Dodson et al. (2013), such interventionist-oriented research is often driven by research funders, are generally proof of concept projects, experimental in nature, and temporary with no long engagement with the field. Combination of one or more of these factors is often cited as reasons for failure of many ICTD projects (Dodson et al. 2013). ...
Information and Communication Technologies for Development is an interdisciplinary area of research associated with engineering, application, and adoption of ICTs in developing regions and/or for development. The International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) was started in 2006 with the objective to build a community of scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. In this paper, we examine the social dimension of ICTD as manifest in co-authorship ties in the papers published in conference proceedings. This research community has 1053 unique authors from 302 institutions in 55 countries. Almost 85% of 456 papers are co-authored by two or more people. Initially, the research community displayed small-world characteristics but the social network subsequently displays a distinct core-periphery structure. Further, collaborative ties among academic institutions in developing countries are comparatively less. A key implication is that institutional support is imperative to initiate and maintain collaborative research ties.
... Introducing new dependencies on external resources could weaken the ability of a local socio-ecological system, by itself and through its own resources, to accommodate shocks or respond to changes. There is a multitude of examples of information services that have been introduced and established through donor funding, only to be removed after the pilot stage (Dodson, Sterling and Bennett, 2013). While such external provision may expand opportunities in the short-term, it might risk leaving the broader system vulnerable to external changes over the longer term. ...
... Irani et al. (2010) argues that technology design in ICTD is interlinked with postcolonial institutional relationships whereby strategic control of projects, and capital, flows towards actors in richer, so-called 'developed' countries. Thirdly, many ICTD projects have focused on improvements in key services such as healthcare, agricultural extension services or education, however successful pilots are seldom translated into benefits at scale (Toyoma, 2015), or are only maintained while they continue to receive external financial support from donors (Heeks, 2011;Dodson, Sterling and Bennett, 2013). One issue is that projects commonly focus on priorities set by the donor agency and operate on timescales aligned with their needs (Heeks, 2002). ...
In this paper, we discuss an approach to co-design in ICT for sustainable development. We first set out to consider sustainable development as incorporate a concern for resilience, adaptability, and autonomy. We then draw on an ongoing participatory design project to illustrate how co-design projects can be configured, along with the political choices that this entails, to support such development.
... A gap between the perspective of developers and proponents of digital technologies (electronic tools that generate, store, process, transmit, display and use data) and the reality of farming communities has been systematically reported in the social literature on digital agriculture and on Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) Heeks 2002;Dodson et al. 2013;Contreras-Medina et al. 2020;Eastwood et al. 2019). Some argue that a common practice in digitalization in agriculture is to embrace a dominant development paradigm that fails to recognize the existence of multiple interpretations of the world, notions of development, and ideas of a desirable future (Beguin et al. 2012;Zheng 2009). ...
A reality-design gap in the conceptualization and practice of digital agriculture has been systematically reported in the literature. This condition is favored by the lack of understanding and inclusion of local worldviews around digital technologies. Informed by Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, this study looks to bring stories of local appropriation to the spotlight. Based on a qualitative approach that included data collected through interviews with 73 households, the authors explored the way in which two selected communities of Colombian coffee growers are engaged in the use of digital technologies in material and symbolic ways. Three emergent themes—a relational way of farming, (dis)connected machines, and nurtured families and communities – articulate multiple interactions between farmers, farms, institutional programs, and technologies, that originate local forms of digitalization (and non-digitalization). This study points out the relevant role of situated ideas of development in positioning technologies in or out of the farm, and broader digitalization agendas in or out of farmers’ life projects. At the same time, it presents a critique of notions of universality that drive unquestioned quests for technification. In contrast, building on a relational perspective, this study calls for embracing a perspective of multiplicity within notions of development and innovation.
... My field observation shows that farmers tend to expect to get an agriculture extension message for free, even if it comes through any digital channel. However, a study (Dodson, Sterling and Bennett, 2012) reviewed different ICT based development projects based on three salient factors: 1. development objective (Is there any development goal?), 2. development perspective (Were the projects top-down or bottom-up), 3. development focus (Were the projects community-centric?). They concluded that those ICT based development project contributed to unsatisfactory development results. ...
Based on fieldwork in five distinct projects, this thesis investigates the role of human infrastructure in the context of digital interventions in the Global South. The settings are an agriculture voice message service for smallholder farmers in Bangladesh, an agricultural information service using phone text messages (SMS) also for farmers in Bangladesh, a for-profit service for farmers in Cambodia using digital applications, a digital mental health intervention for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and a study of the reordering of everyday life through digital technologies in Bangladesh during the Covid-19 pandemic. The focus on human infrastructure is inspired by research within Information & Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD), Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Science Technology Studies (STS) and more. My findings contribute to research and practice by nuancing our understanding of the role of human infrastructure in digital interventions in the Global South. That is, I empirically and conceptually extend the discussion by pointing out how human infrastructure may be 'configured,' 'trained' and 'unravelled' in the context of digital interventions in the Global South. I show how one cannot take the human infrastructure for granted in the sense that it has to be both configured and trained and hence is not simply somehow there. Further, I discuss how a human infrastructure may unravel in the context of digital interventions in the global South and the consequences this may have for continued service provision. These contributions may be useful for both researchers and practitioners as it adds to our understanding of the key role of human infrastructure in digital interventions in the Global South and elsewhere.
... If the state-sponsored development programmes of the past applied high-yield variety seeds, chemical fertilisers, and pesticides to usher in the 'Green Revolution [6], the ICT enabled unified E-Market platform represents the new generation of mandated development programmes. However, it is still being determined whether the benefits have accrued to all the rightful beneficiaries in such ICT-enabled development (ICTD) programmes [5]. For example, prior studies on large-scale state (government) led ICTD programmes like India's Aadhaar digital identity system or the targeted food security program have narratives of being exclusionary, perpetuating associated injustice, creating new forms of corruption, impacting vulnerable subjects, and resulting in deviant development outcomes for the beneficiaries [13,15]. ...
State-mandated ICTD programmes are driven by strong aspirations of modernity where morality is associated with development, and technology is the force to enable that. These aspirations drive the state’s attempt to transform agriculture markets into E-Markets in India. While the state’s narrative claims economic welfare gains for the end beneficiary through technological intervention, our study shows that state-mandated ICTD initiative is poorly adopted by the local actors. In contrast, locally enabled non-state ICT apps find deep use by the same actors for managing various market operations. The novelty is in the ingenious use of common ICT apps in a self-actuated mode, achieving micro efficiencies. Situating this study in state-society dissonance and lensing it through James Scott’s work, Seeing Like a State, shows that vantage matters in development and its consequences on adopting ICTD platforms in the societal systems. In a sort of juxtaposition, the success of non-state ICTs is insightful about what is of value at the local and informs the state that technology adoption and use is not just about the quality or comprehensiveness of the artefact or who is pushing for the change; instead, more about the values that it carries, the appropriateness, and finally how it fits and finds acceptance at the local.
... These dominant discourses unfolding in a rapidly globalised urbanised world with increasing access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) have received criticism not only from scholars but also from policy makers and development organisations. From massive failures in the World Bank's ICT for development programmes (Dodson, Sterling, and Bennett 2013) to private initiatives such as one laptop per child, finding technological fixes for social, economic, and environmental problems have proved unsuccessful (Townsend 2013). Additionally, the impacts and risks of surveillance-enabled smart environments (Galdon-Clavell 2013) have been criticised in light of what smartness might mean for surveillance purposes. ...
Despite the prevalence of smart city discourse across many disciplines, governance systems, and policy-making bodies, its conceptual foundations are based either on semi-/democratic political constellations or deemed apolitical. This research agenda highlights the embeddedness of any smart city agenda within a more extensive political regime. Furthermore, the research agenda focuses on the authoritarian socio-technical imaginaries and their role in shaping smart city policies, implementation, and governance. The research agenda also highlights the research on authoritarian surveillance and its interconnection with authoritarian smart city conceptualisation. Furthermore, it offers three research areas for authoritarian surveillance: authoritarian practices in democratic contexts, the use of surveillance technologies for maintaining autocratic power, and authoritarian structure and governance of platform corporations. Finally, similar to critical voices in critical data studies and the field of information and communication technology for development, the research agenda aims to demystify the prevalent assumption of the good smart city that fixes all injustices that socio-political endeavours have not achieved. It argues that every technologically enabled tool or platform reflects the political constellations in which it is embedded and affects and produces new socio-technical interlinkages that could never be apolitical.
... Dodson, Sterling, & Bennett (2012) [11] Considering failure: Eight years of ITID research This paper reviews ICT4D research and demonstrates how ICT4D potentially contributed to unsatisfactory development results. The paper calls for assessment to other development initiatives. ...
The importance of partnerships is established in the ICT4D academic and practitioner literature as a success factor contributing towards achievement of development outcomes. However, it is also recognised that the failure of partnerships is a common occurrence and there is limited knowledge about the reasons for these failures. International development projects often include partnerships between international organizations and public sector implementers and little is understood about how and why such partnerships may succeed or flounder. This paper aims to improve our understanding of ICT4D project failure by exploring the interplay of logics within an international organization-local public sector partnership. The empirical basis is a longitudinal case study of a health-related ICT4D project in Indonesia. Three vignettes are presented, highlighting the dynamics between local public sector logic and international organization logic. The results show that the “accountability logic”of the international organization (WHO) conflicted with the “hierarchical” public sector logic of the ministry. The paper contributes work in progress towards an improved understanding of partnership failures in ICT4D.
... Here, there is a risk of neglecting users' needs and missing the chance to create a sustainable benefit for both sides. Several ICT4D projects have succeeded in benefitting development, while others have not reached their specified goals mostly due to lack of user participation in a topdown and a technology-centered approach (Dodson, Sterling, & Bennett, 2012;Dray et al., 2003;Garside, 2009). ...
In the Southern African country of Botswana, the Okavango Delta is famous for its abundance of wildlife. However, this popular tourist destination is also inhabited by many people, mostly farmers, who live in close proximity to the national parks. When domesticated animals' grazing land extends into predator territory, fatal conflicts are the consequence: around 250 attacks on cattle were reported in the four villages we researched in 2017, 87 % of them being by lions. Not only are the farmers' livelihood and safety endangered, but poor governmental compensation schemes also lead to frustration , a negative image and even persecution of lions. To solve this problem and reduce conflicts to a minimum, the non-profit organisation CLAWS (Communities Living Among Wildlife Sustainably) has introduced GPS tracking of selected lions by means of attaching collars and establishing a warning system called LionAlert, where researchers notify locals via a text message to their mobile phones whenever a lion enters a critical area. While this has helped reduce attacks by around 50 %, a range of problems remain, among them a static signal area and time frame, network instability, the inefficient nature of manual warning as well as other factors which prevent warning recipients from reacting accordingly.
This Master's thesis deals with an attempt to solve these issues by iteratively designing and evaluating an interactive interface for a new, automatically operated version of Li-onAlert. For this purpose, a Design Case Studies and Participatory Design methodology has been applied (Schuler & Namioka, 1993; Wulf et al., 2018). Over the course of three weeks in August 2018, two rounds of workshops were conducted by an interdisci-plinary team with 35 participants from three villages in the Okavango Delta. They served to determine the concerned parties' current situation, the adoption and usage of the current system as well as the potential for improvement, identifying the initial requirements for the updated system. An interface prototype incorporating participants' suggestions was then evaluated and discussed in the second workshop. Based on feedback from the workshops as well as by the observations of local researchers, a final prototype has been developed and eventually will be implemented in an automated version which features a tablet-based local warning station and an app for two different kinds of mobile devices. Further implications and limitations for mitigating the human-wildlife conflict via information and communication technology (ICT) are discussed below.
... However, designers typically lack experience of living in these societies, and they are unfamiliar with the living conditions and needs of marginalized people (Jagtap et al., 2014). Solutions which are designed outside the context of marginalized societies are often not fully adopted, and their intended impact is unfulfilled (e.g., Dodson et al., 2012;Murcott, 2007;Nieusma, 2004;Thomas, 2006). ...
There is a growing demand for humanitarian aid around the world as the number of displaced people has reached an unprecedented level. At the same time, the number of community-based design and fabrication makerspaces has been growing exponentially. Recently the humanitarian sector has become interested in how these spaces can help marginalized populations, including migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. However, there have been few efforts to document what types of design projects marginalized populations develop in these spaces. More broadly, knowledge on design with and by marginalized people remains underdeveloped. This study responds to this gap in knowledge, by analyzing cases from three makerspaces that support migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in Greece. Ethnographic studies are conducted of twenty-three design projects emerging from these spaces. These projects are analyzed using the framework of Max-Neef’s fundamental needs to show how they simultaneously address functional and non-functional needs. For researchers, this study contributes to knowledge on design with and by marginalized people. For practitioners, this study helps to document the impact of humanitarian makerspaces by showing how design projects emerging from these spaces can address the needs of marginalized people.
... This was clear because at least four computer accounting systems were bought and only used for a short time. Evidence in literature shows that a large number of software in developing countries fail to give the desired results [42]- [45]. The clients in the vegetable market justified that by the inability to deal with new workflow imposed by new software. ...
Software development methods have been evolved to enable producing usable systems rapidly while considering all requirements. Several studies have focused on the need to balance between rapid development and capturing requirements related to user experience and business workflow. This balance has become more urging during COVID19 because many businesses want to quickly transfer to usable electronic systems that are accurate, efficient, easy to learn, satisfy users and support remote work. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework by integrating Rapid Application Development (RAD) method with Participatory Design (PD) method for enabling rapid production of usable systems. Both RAD and PD consist of design stages that can overlap and generate new phases where users participate in the design process and accelerate the production. Five usability tests are also added to the framework to validate the usability of the design at all stages. The Action Research method is used to assess the framework empirically in a context of an urgent need to an electronic system, and qualitative data analyses were conducted. The results show that the framework can be adopted by software companies because it satisfies the requirements of adopting software development methods. Also, the system developed using the framework is usable. The paper concludes that COVID19 affects software development by emphasizing rapid development while maintaining workflow. Also, using video conference for remote design assists in meeting users more frequently and in creating concise requirement documentation.
... Additionally, farmers, especially women, need access to resources they have identified rather than technologies promoted through a supply push pathway (Röling, 2009). The future of extension has recently been promoted as involving information communication technologies (ICT), particularly smart-phone based communications, yet many such projects further a linear transfer of technology approach (Dodson et al., 2012;Silvestri et al., 2020;Steinke et al., 2020). This despite the large body of literature that calls for systems-based participatory research and extension (Simmonds, 1986;Snapp et al., 2018). ...
Effective extension systems are vital to smallholder agriculture. Education on sustainable management involves complex interactions and communication flows among information providers and practitioners. Farmer practice is often overlooked within extension knowledge systems, resulting in incompatible recommendations and barriers to sustainable agriculture. This study investigates the diversity of smallholder agricultural practices, with a focus on maize-legume systems in Tanzania, including seasonal cropping patterns and management, as well as linkages to extension recommendations and information flows. We used a mixed methods approach to assess the state of extension and farmer practice around maize-legume production in Tanzania. Household and plot-level survey data (n = 220) and focus group discussions (n = 5) and extension information was ascertained through interviews with key stakeholders (n = 12) and a survey of village-based extension advisors (n = 193). We found legume management practices were highly local. In the Southern Highlands for example, farmers produced from one to three bean crops per year, using a range of planting arrangements. Further, extension recommendations often did not take into account the varieties, fertilizer or plant spacing used by farmers. This comprehensive study of extension knowledge systems in Tanzania highlights the persistent disconnects that occur at multiple levels, acting as a barrier to sustainable intensification of smallholder farming.
... Externally designed solutions, without involving resource-constrained individuals in design and development activities, might fail to satisfy many varied requirements and constraints in resource-constrained societies (e.g. Nieusma 2004;Dodson et al. 2012;Thomas 2006). Remotely designed solutions might not create desired impact on social and human development of resource-constrained individuals and communities. ...
Codesign with resource-constrained people living in developing countries is crucial for sustained adoption and use of designed solutions. Several studies have investigated codesign with resource-constrained people. It is, therefore, important to understand what has been investigated and learnt so far as well as to plan for further scholarly exploration of this field. To address this, I applied a systematic literature review (SLR) approach to understand main sources, definitions, and theoretical perspectives regarding codesign with resource-constrained people. The SLR also aimed to understand inputs and outputs of codesign as well as factors influencing the codesign process. The findings portray a multifaceted picture regarding these aspects of codesign. I discuss implications of review findings for the practice of codesigning solutions with resource-constrained people, identify concerns that researchers should have about this field, and offer suggestions for future research in this field of codesign.
... In consequence, many novel services were only weakly adopted and discontinued eventually. One important reason for these failures has consisted in mismatches between farmers' technological preferences and abilities, their information needs, and the proposed ICT4Ag solutions (Heeks, 2002;Tongia and Subrahmanian, 2006;Qiang et al., 2012;Dodson et al., 2013;Masiero, 2016). ...
CONTEXT
Innovation based on information and communication technology (ICT) plays an increasingly important role in agricultural research-for-development efforts. It has been recognized, however, that the weak adoption and low impact of many ICT-for-agriculture (ICT4Ag) efforts are partly due to poor design. Often, design was driven more by technological feasibility than by a thorough analysis of the target group's needs and capacities. For more user-centered ICT4Ag development, there is now growing interest in the use of systematic, participatory design methodologies.
OBJECTIVE
Numerous methodologies for participatory design exist, but applying any of them in smallholder farming context can create specific challenges that digital development researchers need to deal with. This article aims to support future digital development efforts by contributing practical insights to recent discussions on the use of participatory design methodologies for ICT4Ag development.
METHODS
We present lessons learned from practical experiences within participatory design projects that developed ICT4Ag solutions in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Based on these experiences and supported by literature, we describe common challenges and limitations that digital designers may face in practice, and discuss possible opportunities for dealing with them.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
The outcomes of digital design projects within research-for-development efforts can be affected by tensions between design ideals and project realities. These tensions may relate to, among others, mismatching expectations among project stakeholders, top-down hierarchies at design partners, insufficient attention to the wider digital ecosystem, and disincentives to re-use ideas and software. Depending on project context, these challenges may need to be addressed by researchers during planning and implementation of digital design projects.
SIGNIFICANCE
The insights in this article may support agricultural development researchers in facilitating more effective participatory design processes. Even though good design is not the only precondition for a successful ICT4Ag service, this can help create more meaningful digital innovation for agricultural development.
... These problems can also result in mismatches between "the context in which a technology is created and the context in which it is meant to be used" (Pejovic 2019). Dodson (2013) similarly concludes that these "top-down, technology-centric, goal-diffuse approaches to (ICTs) contribute to unsatisfactory development results," since these tools and technologies are often developed without understanding the local context or involving end users. This has serious implications for the usefulness, usability, and inclusivity of ICTs in food, land, and water systems and, consequently, their adoption. ...
Food, land, and water systems underpin the health of societies and the environment, yet they are facing pressure from climate change, population growth, urbanization, and the overexploitation of natural resources. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have the potential to support food, land, and water systems in response to these challenges. Despite the optimism surrounding ICT use in food, land, and water systems, these technologies are not currently being used to their full potential. Low technology adoption rates can, in part, be attributed to issues of inclusivity and equity, including people’s ability to access, use, benefit from, and produce ICTs for food, land, and water systems. Where someone lives within interlocking systems of oppression – such as gender, physical ability, age, and race – play a large role.
Lack of inclusivity and equity in ICTs for food, land, and water systems has serious implications. It can produce a positive feedback loop in which privileged people benefit from ICT use and become more privileged, while those marginalized people unable to access ICTs are left behind. Inclusive ICTs increase customer engagement, which enables developers to grow a larger customer base. They also promote innovation and differentiation and eliminate any costs that would be incurred were a developer add features to make the product inclusive after the tool or technology is designed. Inclusive ICTs yield better outcomes for all, because everyone’s needs change over time.
This report presents evidence and explores the key issues surrounding many of these aspects.
... Especially rural or marginalized communities often view development projects initiated by outsiders with distrust and cynicism, making it difficult to gain entry into a community or sustain buy-in once access has been achieved (Barjis, Kolfschoten, and Maritz 2013;Ramadani, Kurnia, and Breidbach 2017). Literature on the subject (Chianca 2008;Heeks and Ospina 2019;Hussain and Chen 2018;Singh, Díaz Andrade, and Techatassanasoontorn 2018;Zheng 2018) argue that ICT4D and I4ID interventions are not 'unequivocally effective in improving the lives of community members in developing areas' according to Magezi (2017, 1) as the failure rate of these initiatives in developing communities consistently outnumbers the success stories (Dodson, Sterling, and Bennett 2012;Krauss 2009;Mbuyisa and Leonard 2017;Mthoko and Pade-Khene 2013;Veldsman and van Greunen 2015). ...
Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) projects aim to improve the living conditions of marginalized communities. However, ICT4D interventions have high failure rates. We draw on the Technological Innovation for Inclusive Development Systems (TI4IDS) framework, which argues that ICT4D projects are embedded in a system affected by many different actors, stakeholders and institutions. We analyze this through a qualitative exploratory case study of an ICT4D project for Elderly Rural Women in Mafarafara in Limpopo, South Africa. We map a set of TI4IDS functions through event history analysis (EHA) to explore how ICT4D projects may be implemented. We draw conclusions regarding the dynamic exhibited in the projects and show how the focus shifted from the development of knowledge and guidance of search to knowledge diffusion during the uptake of the technology with a more significant focus on resource mobilization and market formulation towards the later phases.
... Designs that are externally conceived and simply implemented in the BOP fail to achieve sustainable adoption and impact (e.g. Nieusma 2004;Thomas 2006a;Murcott 2007;Dodson, Sterling, and Bennett 2012). Some authors argue that for sustainable impact on BOP communities, co-design activities are crucial, with a significant need to look beyond technological aspects of design to BOP communities and their context (Jagtap 2019b). ...
The base of the world income pyramid, typically known as the Base of the pyramid (BOP), represents low-income people living in developing countries. Co-design with BOP people is crucial for sustained adoption and use of products and services. Based on interviews with practicing designers, we identify barriers and enablers that the designers encounter in undertaking various tasks in the process of co-designing with these marginalised people. The findings suggest that a broad range of factors, related to the BOP context, co-design processes and methods, organisational issues, and aspects of collaboration , support or hinder activities in the co-design process. Consideration of these factors, as perceived by the designers, can lead to more impactful co-design with BOP people.
... Top-down, technology-centric, goal-diffuse approaches show unsatisfactory development results (Dodson, Sterling & Bennett, 2012). A mix of reasons is offered as hampering the local adoption of technology. ...
Creating ICT access in the rural areas of Africa is a complex challenge. In these areas, telecommunications infrastructure is provided at a very high cost that may not be justified by the resulting use and effects of the telecommunications network. Affordable access to ICTs in rural areas can be frustrated at the supply as well as the demand end of the service-provision chain. To supply ICTs and related services in rural areas, the main challenge is the high level of capital and operating expenditures incurred by service providers. On the demand side, rural adoption of ICTs in developing countries is curtailed by low availability of complementary public services, such as electricity and education, and by the relative scarcity of locally relevant content. This paper highlight the various aspects of the challenges of setting up a First Mile project in rural Zambia. It takes a rather unique angle in that it introduces the perspectives on the value of academic interventions in a manner that not only addresses some of the complex issues but also accommodates cultural adjustment. The paper introduces the rural internet project in Macha, rural Zambia and demonstrates the impact of such an initiative on setting up not only connectivity in a rural community but also dealing with the challenges that come with this.
... digitalprinciples.org) which were designed to guide practical ICT4D interventions, but do not cover research. In the early 2000s, increasing application of digital technologies in development led to concerns with sharing good practice, and avoiding costly stand-alone projects that were ultimately not sustainable (see, for example Dodson et al., 2013). In 2009, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) developed a set of nine principles to guide activities in innovation and technology in development, namely: 'Design with the User,''Understand the Existing Ecosystem,''Design for Scale,' 'Build for Sustainability,''Be Data Driven,''Use Open Standards, Open Data, Open Source, and Open Innovation,'' Reuse and Improve,'' Do no harm' and 'Be Collaborative.' Independently, in 2010, donors in the mHealth domain met at the Greentree Estate in New York State to discuss best practice, leading to the Greentree Principles. ...
Concerns about ethical issues in ICTD/ICT4D research have been growing in recent years, alongside calls to agree minimum ethical standards. This paper reflects on the three-year participatory process, co-facilitated by the authors, that has led to collective agreement on such a set of minimum ethical standards for ICTD/ICT4D research. The standards have been published (at http://www.ictdethics.org) under a Creative Commons licence, and are open for further comment. The current version has been endorsed by the ICTD conference series, and there is ongoing dialogue about their implementation by other conferences, journals, and funding bodies. While the standards themselves are a collective effort, in this paper the facilitators lay out their own specific thinking and approach to the co-production process that they designed and facilitated. It considers the successes, potential for further improvement, as well as critical features underpinning the standards’ legitimacy. These reflections may help guide other research communities interested in such participatory self-regulation processes.
... For example, Cook (2008) stressed the importance of evaluating the extent to which CBPR involves action that affects community-level changes. However, despite good intentions, many past CBPR efforts have experienced colossal failures (Bentley, 1994;Dodson et al., 2012;Melles, 2018;Park, 2018), partially because of inadequate ethical review (Flicker et al., 2007). ...
Communities of color are disproportionately burdened by environmental pollution and by obstacles to influence policies that impact environmental health. Black, Hispanic, and Native American students and faculty are also largely underrepresented in environmental engineering programs in the United States. Nearly 80 participants of a workshop at the 2019 Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) Research and Education Conference developed recommendations for reversing these trends. Workshop participants identified factors for success in academia, which included adopting a broader definition for the impact of research and teaching. Participants also supported the use of community-based participatory research and classroom action research methods in engineering programs for recruiting, retaining, and supporting the transition of underrepresented students into professional and academic careers. However, institutions must also evolve to recognize the academic value of community-based work to enable faculty, especially underrepre-sented minority faculty, who use it effectively, to succeed in tenure promotions. Workshop discussions elucidated potential causal relationships between factors that influence the co-creation of research related to academic skills, community skills, mutual trust, and shared knowledge. Based on the discussions from this workshop, we propose a pathway for increasing diversity and community participation in the environmental engineering discipline by exposing students to community-based participatory methods, establishing action research groups for faculty, broadening the definition of research impact to improve tenure promotion experiences for minority faculty, and using a mixed methods approach to evaluate its impact.
... Historically, this incongruence in project design and implementation has led to many ICT4D projects being viewed as failures. Dodson, Sterling, and Bennett performed an analysis of ICT4D projects over a ten year time frame and found, "Of the papers examined, 70% (28 of the 40) referred to or reflected on some level of failure or unintended negative outcomes related to the use, uptake, or adoption of ICTs in developing communities," (Dodson et al., 2012 the way that the current economic model functions in that society and streamline the process to allow for better production, without stopping how the country currently does business. To get user adoption, there needs to be a way to assist users in their day to day activities with simple technology that can benefit the way that they do business. ...
Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) attempt to make the benefits of the information and communication enabled by technology available to developing or disadvantaged groups, but these projects have historically faced challenges of adoption and sustainability. Social media can potentially provide growth opportunities for ICT4D nonprofit organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) through project adoption and collaboration; however, projects lack guidance on how to track and analyze the impact of the social media campaign on adoption of an ICT4D project. Historically, nonprofits and NGOs have relied on their websites to provide information to key stakeholders and partners, but social media provides an outlet for real-time collaboration as opposed to one-way information dissemination. In the case of ICT4D projects, the collaborative nature of social media can provide a channel to solicit feedback, impart good practices, and drive adoption of the solution for which the project is being conducted. In particular, the 3-2-1 service, a potentially high-value initiative, may benefit from including a social media campaign. The 3-2-1 service allows for organizations to make their content available to everyone within a country, on-demand, for no-cost using a toll-free short-code and using an interactive voice response (IVR) menu. Users dial the short-code and navigate the menu to select content about agriculture, financial services, health, etc.; content would be provided in their local language and recorded by native speakers. This paper explores the manner in which social media can benefit the adoption of the 3-2-1 service within country programs run by the Catholic Relief Services nonprofit organization. Additionally, this paper provides a proposed toolkit that can be used to create a social media campaign to drive adoption of any ICT4D project and provides proposed metrics to track success. Acknowledgments
... Digital media and technology hold tremendous potential to improve lives in both developed and developing country contexts. Despite the possibilities, there remain ongoing challenges for many communities to transform their access to and use of digital technologies into enhanced informational capabilities for improving education, health, employment opportunities, governance, as well as civic and cultural life [1][2][3]. Models of development based on social intermediaries show promise as an approach that emphasizes community empowerment through enhanced informational capabilities [4,5]. ...
This paper reports on a technology stewardship training program to promote ICT leadership development with agricultural extension practitioners in Sri Lanka. Technology stewardship is an approach adapted from the communities of practice literature that recognizes the importance, practically and ethically, of guiding change from within a community. The technology steward’s role in development is not to impose ICT solutions on a community of practice but instead to empower members as part of a “change through choice” strategy, with the end goal of improving the informational capabilities of the community. Researchers assessed the training program using a multimethod approach with a single embedded case study. Data were collected using a pre-course survey, formal course evaluation, classroom observation, and semi-structured interviews with participants. Findings from this study show a positive response to technology stewardship training among agricultural extension practitioners in the course, that learning objectives of the course are achievable when offered as an in-service training program, that self-confidence with ICT is improved, and that some participants applied their learning in a post-course activity. This study contributes to a better understanding of the role of social learning to foster change in ICT practices among communities of practice in agricultural extension services, and in contributing to effective use of ICT for development more broadly.
... Designs that are externally conceived and simply implemented in the BOP fail to achieve sustainable adoption and impact (e.g. Murcott, 2007;Dodson et al., 2012). Some authors argue that for sustainable impact on BOP communities, co-design activities are crucial, with a significant need to look beyond technological aspects of design to BOP communities and their context (Jagtap, 2019b). ...
Co-design with marginalised people is crucial for sustained adoption and use of frugal innovations or Product Service Systems (PSS). Interviews were conducted with eighteen designers to identify barriers and enablers that they encounter in co-designing with marginalised people. The findings suggest that the factors supporting or hindering this co-design relate to the context of marginalised societies, co-design processes and methods, organisational issues, and aspects of collaboration. Consideration of these factors can lead to more impactful co-design with marginalised people.
... The study took place in the context of the public extension system of Tanzania. To adjust the novel service to this context, the design process needed to avoid large gaps between design and reality, which have often limited the subsequent adoption of digital services by farmers (Dodson, Sterling, & Bennett, 2012;Heeks, 2002;Masiero, 2016). We implemented a user-centred design process, which helped to understand existing information needs, to select matching technologies, and to adapt them with feedback from prospective users. ...
Sustainable intensification (SI) is promoted as a rural development paradigm for sub-
Saharan Africa. Achieving SI requires smallholder farmers to have access to
information that is context-specific, increases their decision-making capacities, and
adapts to changing environments. Current extension services often struggle to
address these needs. New mobile phone-based services can help. In order to
enhance the public extension service in Tanzania, we created a digital service that
addresses smallholder farmers’ different information needs for implementing SI.
Using a co-design methodology – User-Centered Design – we elicited feedback
from farmers and extension agents in Tanzania to create a new digital information
service, called Ushauri. This automated hotline gives farmers access to a set of prerecorded
messages. Additionally, farmers can ask questions in a mailbox. Extension
agents then listen to these questions through an online platform, where they
record and send replies via automated push-calls. A test with 97 farmers in
Tanzania showed that farmers actively engaged with the service to access
agricultural advice. Extension agents were able to answer questions with reduced
workload compared to conventional communication channels. This study illustrates
how User-Centered Design can be used to develop information services for
complex and resource-restricted smallholder farming contexts.
... However, despite these expectations, new acquisitions of ICT resources do not always lead to the intended meaningful improvements for developing nations. In fact, Dodson et al. (2013) and Harris (2015) demonstrated that numerous ICT4D projects have failed to achieve the expected social transformations. ...
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has contributed significantly to the socioeconomic development of societies. Especially developing countries are now beginning to experience the digital service transformations that previously took place in the western world. However, very little is known about the extent to which ICTs have transformed developing countries on a macro, meso, and micro level. In fact, the current lack of knowledge related to digital service transformation in developing countries may be one reason for why ICT for Development (ICT4D) projects continue to fail, and evidently do not achieve the anticipated societal impact. This research-in-progress aims to address this significant gap in knowledge and associated societal challenge by proposing potential research pathways rooted in the meta-theoretical lens of Service-dominant (SD) logic. We put forward a novel research framework that demonstrates how SD logic may be applied to investigate ICT-enabled service transformation in developing countries, and delineate future research avenues for Information Systems scholars attempting to contribute knowledge related to this important area of interest.
... Also, the role of stakeholders has not been well recognized in design and evaluation of these services in underserved contexts, and particularly from design thinking perspective [15]. More so, it's argued that although most of the literature is focused on underserved populations, it's apparent that contexts vary in terms of culture, infrastructure, education and or literacy among other factors which can impact results [16]. Therefore, the research question this study attempts to answer is: How can a robust conceptual framework be developed to guide the design and evaluation process for mHealth services in an underserved context as a health care service facilitated by technologies that incorporate mobile technologies? ...
mHealth interventions have been widely adopted across health systems in attempts to improve healthcare delivery particularly in underserved contexts, Kenya included. This has made mHealth more established as opposed to telemedicine. However, the effectiveness of the interventions is questionable as there lacks a clear sustenance and scale-up strategy for successful implementation, despite mHealth having been adopted as one of the pillars for Kenya's national e-health strategy. Apparently, there is a paucity of empirical evidence to understand the complex nature of technology use in mHealth services from design thinking perspective. Also, the role of stakeholders in designing these services has not been well recognized. This paper focuses on mHealth as a healthcare service facilitated by technologies that incorporate mobile technologies. Objectives of the study include: (1) To identify and engage relevant stakeholders, (2) To establish design characteristics of the desired solution, (3) To design & develop context-specific solutions, (4) To evaluate new services in-use situation. A generic model is proposed to guide design and evaluation process for mHealth services, using both lens of service design research and stakeholder theory. Two distinct phases were added to the double diamond process of service design i.e. 'engage context' as pre-implementation evaluation phase at the start and 'evaluate in-use' as post-implementation evaluation phase at the end of the process. The new model was empirically tested by fifteen participants (n=15), of which the outcome met expectations according to validation scorecard. In so doing, our study extends and complement existing body of knowledge.
... Within the context of information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) research cell phones, in particular simple feature phones, represent a well-studied common platform for which adoption constraints have been studied extensively (Dell & Kumar, 2016). However, ICT4D studies with mobile phone users often "assume a reasonable amount of literacy" (Dodson, Sterling, & Bennett, 2012) and only a few studies examine how these users interact with smartphones. An even lower number of studies looks into the design of interfaces that may assist low-literate in developing countries in data collection tasks and only a few provide evidence of interaction barriers within this context (see Section 2). ...
Extreme citizen science is a bottom up practice used to empower people by supporting them, via processes and technological tools, to find solutions for local problems, but also to tackle major sustainability challenges of the 21st century. Methods and tools based on mobile computing have been utilized by communities in various parts of the world, from the Congo Basin through the Amazonian rain forest. However, extreme citizen science initiatives often face severe challenges as pre-designed technological solutions prove to be non-transferable to peculiar environments of rural developing regions. In this paper we collect and investigate evidence from the implementation of various extreme citizen science initiatives in the developing world. Our aim is to identify key obstacles towards their successful realization, mainly focusing on the problem of user interaction with mobile computing solutions. We conduct interviews with nine experienced researchers who all performed extensive fieldwork within these initiatives, and who reflect on the technology interaction, knowledge organization, inter-cultural, social and usability issues. Based on our analysis we report among others, symptomatic difficulties with abstractions, representational hierarchies, and navigation commands, as well as potential improvements that mobile technology developers can implement in order to create a more inclusive environment for extreme citizen science.
... The consensus, however, is that women do not have the skillset to 'engage meaningfully' with mobile phones or technology, and they are 'too weighed down by household duties to have the time' (p. 1). Dodson, Sterling, and Bennett (2012) studied the sociolinguistic barriers rural women face in Morocco while using mobile devices, presenting a mobile phone utility gap that includes but is not limited to multiple spoken dialects, multiple written languages, and multiple numbering systems on the mobile phones women have access to creating a greater issue of comprehension. ...
The relationships among gender, institutional structures, and their associated physical spaces are made visible with the deployment and diffusion of technologies within said spaces. As such, we seek to explore the gendering of technology specifically exploring how users gender gaming spaces and gaming practices. In this article, we challenge the notion of ICTs and gender neutrality exploring how institutional frameworks as well as formal and informal structures impact the ways new technologies are deployed and used. Based on a 10-month ethnography in Community Technology Centers (CTCs) in the favelas, urban slums of Vitória, Brazil, this paper focuses on the uses of ICTs by favela residents, and expands the notion of technological space beyond the physical into the domain of space as socially constructed and negotiated, exposing how space can be defined by socially explicit and implicit boundaries.
... Our framework and case studies illustrate the ways that maximizing asset utilization and minimizing novelty in interventions can facilitate sustainable impact. We hope researchers will use the framework alongside other design approaches that promote sustainable impact, such as community-led intervention [4] and co-designing "interventions and change with community partners, not for them" [5]. ...
HCI interventions often fall short of delivering lasting impact in resource-constrained contexts. We reflect on a project where we followed the "right" steps of needs-based, human-centered design, yet failed to deliver impact to the community. We introduce a framework that evaluates an intervention's potential for sustainable impact by maximizing use of assets in the community and minimizing novelty. We propose assets-based design as an approach that starts with what a community has, leveraging those assets in a design, as opposed to a needs-based approach that focuses on adding what a community lacks.
ABSTRACT-This paper presents a survey and analysis of the software industry in Sudan. The study
aims to provide a realistic description of the industry in order to identify its strengths and weaknesses
and the issues that need to be prioritized in order to further develop the Sudanese software industry.
We present the results of a survey of 16 software development companies in which we targeted the
opinions of the CEOs and developers within these companies and the academic and industrial experts
within the software engineering field. Our results describe the demographics of these companies, their
software development processes and the identified risks to the industry. Furthermore, we provide an
evaluation of the perceived and actual software development practices in the industry. In view of the
limited studies of the software industry in Sudan, this paper contributes necessary research and
analysis as a step for future research into the local software development practices and processes.
Drawing from Feminist Science and Technology Studies, this paper explores how we might revisit and recuperate past academic research projects, theories, and relationships to design futures that matter for social good. As context, I begin by outlining a decade of research in Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD), which linked the United Nations Millennium Development Goals to innovations in telecommunications and computing. I then introduce the ‘theory of design-reality gaps’ that was proposed by Heeks to study ’wicked problems’ in this domain (2002). I revisit two strands of research that I carried out in relation to the ‘design-reality gap’. The first involved an ethnographic study of a participatory mobile phone based learning intervention for Kenyan health workers. I argued that instead of a singular ‘gap’ explained by geographic, sociocultural, or economic ‘divides’, there was a messy entanglement, constituted by sociomaterial practices that enacted a multiplicity (Mol in The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice, Duke University Press, 2002) of desired futures. In the second strand, I attempted to care for the practices that were abandoned by the learning intervention when one kind of justice was prioritized over others. This explored how the research could be more ‘speculative’ and how this ‘speculative commitment’ could generate new ethical questions and logics for living with technology (Puig de la Bellacasa in Social Studies of Science, 41(1), 85–106, 2011 and Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2017). I argue that approaching the design-reality ‘gap’ as a multiplicity instead of a void can support Tuck’s call for educational interventions that turn away from damage oriented theories of change to ones based on desire – approaching difference not as a lack, but as an ever-growing assemblage (2009). Tinkering with the original Heeks model, I conclude that in the postdigital era, the design-reality gap is now better-understood as a fluid space of multiplicities, and what is arguably most pressing is to study the differences in competing objectives and values, rather than disparities in information and technology.
ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) are increasingly seen as a necessary development tool. While digitally connected communities of the Global North benefit from modern ICTs to access endless information sources, collaboration opportunities and platforms to reform social processes, access to appropriate ICT infrastructure and resources remains a challenge for many Global South communities. We use a range of case studies as evidence to argue that in this era of digital connectivity and globalization, those who are not digitally connected are newly marginalized and disadvantaged. Not having access to or the capacity to utilize modern ICTs systematically silences the voices of the digitally disconnected and gives rise to exclusion and inequality. Considering the significance of digital connectivity needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) among economically developing communities, this article aims to unmask the complex challenges associated with the traditional, model-building approaches towards the development and deployment of ICT tools around the world in general and the Global South in particular. The case studies and examples in this article show that, at present, there are significant obstacles that widen rather than narrow the gap between theory and practice, thereby increasing the digital divide. An unreflective approach that assumes ICTs are good for development may lead to practices that have the opposite effect: entrenching rather than eradicating marginalization. If ICTs are to serve the greater societal good and assist in achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs), then research must not only serve profit-making interests; it must also inform state-level policy-making through theoretically informed, critical, reflective, and engaged inquiry.
Although a large body of literature exists to support the execution of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) initiatives, many such initiatives fail to deliver the intended results. By following a Design Science Research (DSR) methodology, this article presents an artifact (a framework) whose purpose is to integrate activities/processes noted in the literature to support the successful development of ICT4D initiatives. The result of the study is an evaluated process framework which serves as a tool to guide developers in identifying activities/processes that can support the success of ICT4D initiatives.
Digital identity systems are not devised for their own sake, rather they are developed by institutions as part of their pursuit of specific goals— such as economic, social and developmental outcomes through enabling individual rights and facilitating access to basic services and entitlements. A growing number of organisations and institutions are advancing specific principles, frameworks and “imaginaries” of what ‘good’ digital identity looks like—yet it is often not clear how much influence they have or what their underlying worldview is to those designing, developing and deploying these systems. This paper introduces socio–political configurations as a means of studying these underlying worldviews. Socio–political configurations combine elements from technological frames, expectations and imaginations as well as developmental discourses to provide a basis for critically examining three key documents in this space.
The article presents three case studies of frugal social innovation developed by groups of citizens from underserved communities of Cape Town, South Africa. The processes are analyzed to highlight how innovation emerged. Three factors were crucial: lack of resources, social transformation goals, and flexibility of the approach to technologies. Their combination allowed for creativity and inclusivity to become the drivers of the processes. The information and communication technology outcomes are innovative in the context and for the participants. More innovative are the processes, which maintained a high level of participation, a collective collaboration and a focus on the social transformative impact of the digital solutions. Furthermore, while much of the literature on frugal and social innovation has a business perspective whereby users are referred to as customers, the cases present community groups as innovators. This approach contributes to the development of a theory, which expands existing ones on frugal and social innovation. The principles derived from the analysis represent the contribution to practice in the ICT4D domain. They show how in a space with limited technical and procedural knowledge, it is possible to reduce the blinders toward innovation and operate in an ecosystem where participation, inclusion, and growth develop.
Research on information systems (IS) in developing countries focuses on understudied contexts that recent scholars believe have the potential to provide new knowledge. However, the extant discussion on this endeavor rarely considers IS scholars inside the developing countries who could be the ideal discoverers of such context-specific knowledge. In this study, we review the facilitating conditions of the discovery of new theories to examine IS research in the case of Indonesia. We then interview experienced Indonesian IS scholars to develop a richer understanding of the IS scholarship's conditions. We found that while considering and theorizing context have been interests by a small group, the extant efforts are intertwined by the lack of exposure to myriad research epistemology/methodology, the infancy state of IS as a discipline, and the tendency to address convenient rather than crucial research questions, all of which are manifested in a complex institutional environment. We then provide important pathways and future agendas to strengthen and advance IS scholarship in developing countries.
Researching and designing Internet infrastructure solutions in rural and tribal contexts requires reciprocal relationships between researchers and community partners. Methodologies must be meaningful amid local social textures of life. Achieving transdisciplinarity while relating research impacts to partner communities takes care work, particularly where technical capacity is scarce. The Full Circle Framework is an action research full stack development methodology that foregrounds reciprocity among researchers, communities, and sovereign Native nations as the axis for research purpose and progress. Applying the framework to deploy television white space infrastructure in sovereign Native nations in northern New Mexico reveals challenges for rural computing, including the need to design projects according to the pace of rural and tribal government workflows, cultivate care as a resource for overworked researchers and community partners, and co-create a demand for accurate government data around Internet infrastructures in Indian Country and through rural counties.
This paper reconstructs the major points of criticism of both research and practice of Information and Communication Technologies for/and Development (ICT4D/ICTD). Since ICT4D/ICTD was established both as a stream in development work and as an academic field of study, numerous critical reflections on its norms, theories, methods, and consequences were published. This paper provides a first comprehensive compilation and synthesis of what the authors term ICT4D critique. The authors recount criticism about the modus operandi of ICT4D research, the alleged weakness of theories and lack of quality, research gaps, and the politics of ICT4D research. They further recite criticism of the neoliberal orientation of ICT4D practice, the lack of user-centric projects, Eurocentrism and techno-optimism, and the lack of ethical reflection in the field. This paper is intended to serve as a resource and point of reference for students, researchers, and practitioners, in particular those who are new to the field.
This study suggests ways to strengthen and clarify conceptual underpinnings of information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) evaluation by exploring its associations with other related evaluation fields – program evaluation, information system/information technology (IS/IT) evaluation, and aid/development evaluation. These fields have developed long and rich theoretical discourses, models, and approaches over the years, which are of interest to strengthen evaluation practices in ICT4D. Through detailed content analyses and expert interviews, we find that ICT4D evaluation shows significant parallels with the three fields in theory and practice. Also, we see that ICT4D evaluation has developed its own discourse – in particular, ICT4D researchers have valued capturing the situated development context of ICT. We argue that ICT4D evaluation can learn more from other evaluation traditions and disciplines, in order to help move the field to a more ‘mature’ stage.
Other complicating and risk factors are introduced to show the extent of interdependencies between health and education. The situation of women and children, besides the series of risks and uncertainties faced, impose more advanced coordination schemes. Accounting for these risks can ensure good conditions for the use of different ICT components. New means and strategies for mobilizing ICTs2 either for databases or software tools and empirical analyses are also important when considering the process of accounting for interdependencies. However, the enhancement of literacy in each economy appears to be conditioning the success of Internet penetration.
Cultural probes have long been used in HCI to provide designers with glimpses into the local cultures for which they are designing, and thereby inspire novel design proposals. HCI4D/ICTD researchers are increasingly interested in more deeply understanding local cultures in the developing regions where they work, in designing technologies that are not strictly related to socioeconomic development, and in considering new design approaches. However, few use this subjective, design-led method in their research. In this paper, I present a case study detailing my experience designing and deploying cultural probes in Bungoma, Kenya. Returns from my comment cards and digital camera activities draw attention to probe recipients' unique experiences and to Bungoma's distinctive characteristics; they also inspired a series of speculative design proposals. My experience motivates a discussion that elaborates on how a cultural probes approach can benefit HCI4D/ICTD research by raising questions about generalizability, objectivity, and the pursuit of a single solution in design. More broadly, I offer a case study demonstrating an alternative way to approach design in HCI4D/ICTD.
L’essor du mobile en Afrique a suscité un enthousiasme fort, dont témoignent tant les rapports et programmes des institutions de l’aide au développement, que la constitution récente d’une « communauté » rassemblant chercheurs, ONG, bailleurs et entreprises autour des nouvelles technologies pour le développement (Information and communication technologies for development ou ICTD). En ouverture de ce numéro qui rassemble des recherches récentes sur les usages des technologies mobiles en Afrique subsaharienne, nous proposons un état des lieux. Le mobile a-t-il tenu ses promesses ? Que sait-on de ses usages concrets en Afrique subsaharienne ? L’article rend compte d’un décalage important entre les promesses des programmes internationaux ou des prévisions économiques, et la réalité des pratiques et des usages. Il introduit les articles du dossier qui mettent en évidence tant l’importance qu’occupe le téléphone mobile dans le quotidien des populations, que la pluralité, et la complexité, des modalités d’appropriations effectives et des enjeux qu’il soulève pour le continent.
The present research began with one main question: How can new technologies be effective for poor and illiterate children and youth in developing countries? We addressed this question through a research-based implementation project in India that included the development of local language multimedia software for literacy; a built-in, user-friendly interface; and the use of existing computer infrastructure. Two studies were undertaken in Andhra Pradesh state. One included a sample of youth and young adults who had never gone to school (or dropped out early) in peri-urban Hyderabad, and the other was composed of young second- and third-grade school children in rural West Godavari district. Based on a short-term intervention program, research results demonstrated a modest positive impact on the learning rate in reading with both groups of learners (when compared with control groups without the multimedia intervention). The findings provide support for the view that information and communications technologies for development can assist in promoting literacy among the poorest of the poor. In addition, the present results support the view that the digital divide, as it evolves over time, will only be narrowed when content-based solutions are sensitive to, and built on cultural and linguistic diversity.
The field of Information and Communication Technology for Development includes participatory and action research pilots with a research and change agenda. Such ICT4D research does not fit traditional models for evaluating community risk and benefit. Looking at the history of informed consent and international development, uses of informed consent in development scenarios, and at efforts specific to ICTD research, we present how informed consent is currently addressed, as well as the inadequacy of adapting present academic informed consent models to development. Informed consent in ICT4D research provides academic rigor to the field, helps establish a fair, moral and candid relationship with the community to set expectations, and standards for other intervention-based research efforts. We suggest practical recommendations for models that contribute to community involvement and trust, while offering the target community an opportunity to negotiate their level of participation
Achieving the Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty by half will require taking action simultaneously on two separate fronts. It will require helping poor people make an escape out of poverty. It will also call for stemming the flow of people into poverty. Descents into poverty have occurred alongside escapes in every one of the forty Peruvian communities investigated here. Different reasons are related, respectively with escapes and with descents. Making progress in poverty reduction will require accelerating escapes while simultaneously slowing down descents. Different policies will be required to serve these two separate purposes.
In this paper, we make the case that ICT projects in the developed and developing world often lead to partial or total failures due to the incomplete assessment of the problem being solved and the metrics used to evaluate solutions. While in the developed world the success of ICT solutions are often determined by the market, with available infrastructure and market mechanisms, in the developing world this ecosystem does not exist thus requiring an understanding of the ecosystem in which ICT solutions are to be applied. Using literature from the design space, and experiences in ICT for development, we elaborate the dimensions of design such as incorporation of stakeholders, incentive structures, and design participation that are critical to successful deployment. We examine some successes and failures in product/solution development in the ICT area to identify the dimensions of good design incorporated by these products and services. With the perspective that ICT for sustainable development issues are ill-structured and "wicked problems" that have to incorporate all the defined dimensions of design, we propose a model of product and service identification and development that is based on insights from asynchronous computational agent problem solving. We claim that new methods such as the one proposed need to be identified, developed and tested for their effectiveness in the development of products and services that satisfy the needs of human development
In this paper, we present what we believe to be the first documented experiment to replace an existing PC-based system that had goals of "bridging the digital divide" for an agricultural district with a mobile-phone-based system in which a small, but relevant amount of data is transferred to farmers via SMS text messaging. Implemented in rural Maharashtra, Warana Unwired sought to replace an existing PC-based system for managing information in a sugarcane cooperative with an SMS-based mobile-phone system. In an eight-month trial involving seven villages, Warana Unwired successfully replicated all of the PC-based functionality, and was found to be less expensive, more convenient, and more popular with farmers than the previous PC-based system. This paper discusses the early investigations of the Warana Wired Village Project that led to the conception and implementation of the Warana Unwired project. The new system is described in detail, and results, both quantitative and qualitative are analyzed.
We report on an ethnographic study of mobile stores' business practices in a slum community in Mumbai. The basic mobile phone store that sells small "talktime" (the period of billing per call) is graduating to repair, formatting, and maintenance of phone hardware and software. Central to this process of store expansion and skill building is the store entrepreneur. He forges relations with procurement channels and mediating agents, renewing existing ties and expanding business loops by interweaving social and business networks. We refer to these aggregations as "hybrid networks," and we highlight their main-tenance as a critical resource governing enterprise potential. By evoking the ecology of the mobile phone business in an urban slum setting, the paper draws attention to the following concepts: 1) the unique potential of ICTs as an entrepreneurial commodity, 2) the micro-and small enterprise (MSE) as a functional model for local technology immersions, and 3) local social networks as pivotal in expanding technology adoption and aligning with the needs of the low-income consumer. In essence, we locate the small mobile phone store as the site of convergence for the commercial expansion of mobile phone technology.
Digital green is a research project that seeks to disseminate targeted agricultural information to small and marginal farmers in India using digital video. The unique components of digital green are (1) a participatory process for content production, (2) a locally generated digital video database, (3) human-mediated instruction for dissemination and training, and (4) regimented sequencing to initiate a new community. Unlike some systems that expect information or communication technology alone to deliver useful knowledge to marginal farmers, digital green works with existing, people-based extension systems and aims to amplify their effectiveness. While video provides a point of focus, it is people and social dynamics that ultimately make digital green work. Local social networks are tapped to connect farmers with experts; the thrill of appearing "on TV" motivates farmers; and homophily is exploited to minimize the distance between teacher and learner. In a four-month trial involving 16 villages (1070 households), digital green was seen to increase adoption of certain agriculture practices by a factor of six to seven times over classical person-only agriculture extension. The hardware investment was a TV and a DVD-player per village, and one digital camera and PC shared among all 16 villages. These results are very preliminary, but promising.
This paper describes a research endeavor aimed at exploring the role that technology can play in improving child literacy in developing communities. An initial pilot study and subsequent four-month-long controlled field study in Ghana investigated the viability and effectiveness of an automated reading tutor in helping urban children enhance their reading skills in English. In addition to quantitative data suggesting that automated tutoring can be useful for some children in this setting, these studies and an additional preliminary pilot study in Zambia yielded useful qualitative observations regarding the feasibility of applying technology solutions to the challenge of enhancing child literacy in developing communities. This paper presents the findings, observations and lessons learned from the field studies.
We examine the extent to which user-based subsidies can promote the sustainability and development impact of telecenters, where sustainability is defined in financial and social terms. We do this by looking at a coupon scheme used by the USAID funded eCenter network in Kyrgyzstan. The network consisted of partnerships with existing commercial computer centers which provided fee-based ICT services to their communities. The eCenter program temporarily provided subsidized coupons for Internet access and computer training to users of these centers. Using a mixed-method approach, we found that user-based subsidies have to a certain degree aided financial sustainability by bringing new users to the centers, some of who will, conceivably, become long-term customers bringing ongoing revenues. The subsidies also helped to "kick-start" operations during the initial stage of the project. However we found that the distribution of the coupons did not lead to any significant enhancements to social sustainability by, for instance, encouraging users from underrepresented social groups (though we did find that women were marginally more likely to take advantage of the program). Moreover, we found that the distribution of both Internet and training coupons favored more regular users of the eCenters. Finally, looking beyond sustainability to impact within the community, we found that the coupon program had a limited development impact on participating communities. For example, the population of users who reported economic benefits from using the eCenter (eg. subsequent employment or starting a new business), did not make more use of the coupon program than the user population at large, suggesting that the coupon program itself did not account for this benefit. We argue that, even in the presence of such modest positive effects, user-based subsidies still offer an intriguing model. We believe that if the eCenters had narrowly targeted particular participants for the coupon programs it -
is likely that the benefits of the program can be enhanced. For example, better social targeting of the coupons could have brought in more women or under represented groups. From a financial sustainability point of view, explicitly targeting new users (as opposed to people already using the center) could have also been more effective. In terms of impact, coupons could have been distributed, for example, specifically to entrepreneurs looking to start a new business. A method of incentivizing eCenter management to perform such targeting is probably required.
Philippe Baumard is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and also a Professor of Strategy in the University of Aix-Marseille III, IAE Aix-en-Provence. He has held visiting positions at New York University, the University of Technology, Sydney, and Lund University. He is the author of eight books and 26 articles on topics such as tacit knowledge of executives, imaginary organizations, competitive dynamics and strategic information in large firms. University of California, Institute of Business and Economic Research, F508 Haas MC 1922, Berkeley, CA 94720-0001, Phone 510-643-1935, E-mail: pbaumard@berkeley.edu, web page: http://iber.berkeley.edu/Res/pbaumard.htm
Ten years ago, we presented the DeLone and McLean Information Sys- tems (IS) Success Model as a framework and model for measuring the complex- dependent variable in IS research. In this paper, we discuss many of the important IS success research contributions of the last decade, focusing especially on research efforts that apply, validate, challenge, and propose enhancements to our original model. Based on our evaluation of those contributions, we propose minor refinements to the model and propose an updated DeLone and McLean IS Success Model. We discuss the utility of the updated model for measuring e-commerce system success. Finally, we make a series of recommendations regarding current and future measurement of IS success.
This article presents evidence that--alongside the successes-- many information systems in developing countries can be categorized as failing either totally or partially. It then develops a new model that seeks to explain the high rates of failure. The model draws on contingency theory in order to advance the notion of design-actuality gaps: the match or mismatch between IS designs and local user actuality. This helps identify two high-risk archetypes that affect IS in developing countries: country context gaps and hard-soft gaps. The model is also of value in explaining the constraints that exist to local IS improvisations in developing countries. Overall, the article shows how model and theory help understand IS cases in developing countries, and equally, how those cases provide valuable data to help develop IS models and theories.
Sumario: I. A two-level perspective on tchnology -- II. Beyond efficiency -- III. Do you know who you're talking to? -- IV. Electronic group dynamics -- V. Increasing personal connections -- VI. Control an influence -- VII. Designing information procedures -- VIII. New ways of organizing -- IX. Making connections. Bibliografía : P. 189-204
This article reports on a small and medium enterprise (SME) survey carried out by the ResearchICTAfrica (RIA) in 14 African countries. It argues that the negative return on investment reported in the literature can be attributed to the failure to distinguish between the formal and informal sectors. This article demonstrates that informal SMEs have a higher profitability than formal ones. It further shows that ICTs are productive input factors and that their use increases labor productivity for informal as well as formal SMEs. The article further argues that there is still demand for fixed-line phones among SMEs but that mobile phones have become the default communications tool because fixed lines are either too expensive or not available. The primary policy recommendation arising out of this is that applications for SMEs need to be developed using mobile phones. (c) 2007 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Speech recognition has often been suggested as a key to universal information access, as the speech modality is a "natural" way to interact, does not require literacy, and relies on existing telephony infrastructure. However, success stories of speech interfaces in developing regions are few and far between. The challenges of literacy, dialectal variation, and the prohibitive expense of creating the necessary linguistic resources are intractable using traditional techniques. We present our findings evaluating a low-cost, scalable speech-driven application designed and deployed in a community center in rural Tamil Nadu, India, to disseminate agricultural information to village farmers. (c) 2007 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
COMMONSense Net (CSN) is an ongoing research project that focuses on the design and implementation of a sensor network for agricultural management in developing countries, with a special emphasis on the resource-poor farmers of semiarid regions. Throughout the year 2004, we carried out a survey on the information needs of the population living in a cluster of villages in Southern Karnataka, India. The results highlighted the potential that environment-related information has for the improvement of farming strategies in the face of highly variable conditions, in particular for risk management strategies (choice of crop varieties, sowing and harvest periods, prevention of pests and diseases, efªcient use of irrigation water, etc.). Accordingly, we advocate an original use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Our demand-driven approach for the design of appropriate ICT tools that are targeted at the resource-poor, we believe, is relatively new. In order to go beyond a pure technocratic approach, we adopted an iterative, participatory methodology. (c) 2007 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
We describe work toward the goal of a user interface (UI) designed such that even novice, illiterate users require absolutely no intervention from anyone at all to use. Our text-free UI is based on many hours of ethnographic design conducted in collaboration with a community of illiterate domestic laborers in three Bangalore slums. An ethnographic design process was used to understand what kind of application subjects would be interested in, how they respond to computing technology, and how they react to specific UI elements. We built two applications using these principles, one for job search for domestic laborers and another for a generic map that could be used for navigating a city. The resulting designs are based on key lessons that we gained through the design process. This article describes the design process, the design principles, which evolved out of the process, the final application designs, and results from initial user testing. Our results confirm previous work that emphasizes the need for semiabstracted graphics and voice feedback, but we additionally find that some aspects of design for illiterate users that have been previously overlooked (such as a consistent help feature). Results also show that the text-free designs are strongly preferred over standard text-based interfaces by the communities which we address and that they are potentially able to bring even complex computer functions within the reach of users who are unable to read. (c) 2007 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The application of ICTs to meet development objectives has increased dramatically in recent years. Nevertheless, there is a little overall evidence regarding the impact of these tools on the poor. Therefore, this article describes the creation and assessment of the Livestock Guru, an interactive multimedia program for poor livestock keepers in India and Bolivia. Learning outcomes were explored among 305 farmers in 17 communities across both nations. The study also compared the impact of the software with more conventional media such as videos and written extension material. The authors found that the uptake of new knowledge was highly related to the specific topic involved. Not surprisingly, the level of challenge to existing beliefs also affected learning. Nonetheless, by utilizing visual cues and referents that supported traditional knowledge frames, the software messages showed greater levels of knowledge than messages delivered by more traditional means. (c) 2007 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This paper explores the possibility of constructing a "minimally invasive" learning model from the results of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) Icon Association Inventory (devised by Dangwal and Inamdar [Mitra 2003]). We discuss the results obtained from four playground (hole-in-the-wall) computer kiosk sites in southern India, made freely available to children, without supervision, for nine months. Computing skills acquisition, as measured by the Icon Association Inventory, was plotted for each month and the learning curves are reported in the paper. The observed curves were fitted to predicted curves to understand the rates and stages of learning. Results indicate uniform improvement in the computing skills of the children who used these kiosks. Copyright (c) 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Participatory Geographic Information and Multimedia Systems (PGIMSs) were developed and used by two rural communities in Indonesia. This paper reports on the empowerment impacts that resulted from this development project. Empowerment related to PGIMS is examined using a two-dimensional analytical framework that explores the phenomenon at two social scales (individual and community), and is related to four empowerment catalysts associated with the project (information, process, skills, and tools). This paper evaluates the appropriateness of the analytical framework and concludes with general observations about the relationship between empowerment and PGIMS. Copyright (c) 2005 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Information Technologies and International Development.
For at least the past decade, political leaders and policy makers have stressed how important it is for Africa to harness technology, leapfrog development, and take part in the global knowledge economy. In numerous initiatives aimed at realizing these goals, education is a primary target, viewed as a mechanism through which information and communication technologies (ICT) can empower societies to develop technologically literate workforces. Unfortunately, there is a considerable gap between policy rhetoric and effective project implementation. Even as ICT-in-education projects increase rapidly in number and scope across the continent, many still lack necessary pre-project assessments, enumerated goals for outcomes, or understanding of what technology can and cannot do. This article’s focus on policies, partnerships, and pragmatism is informed by a case study of a multi-partnered ICT-in-education project in rural Uganda that set pragmatic technology-use goals, a project for which governmental policy provided an important initial incentive, and which was subsequently revised to address actual student needs for acquiring technology skills. The case offers important lessons to inform both similar projects and government-led policy initiatives in the future.
Nearly forty percent of humanity lives on an average of two dollars a day or less. If you've never had to survive on an income so small, it is hard to imagine. How would you put food on the table, afford a home, and educate your children? How would you handle emergencies and old age? Every day, more than a billion people around the world must answer these questions. Portfolios of the Poor is the first book to systematically explain how the poor find solutions to their everyday financial problems. The authors conducted year-long interviews with impoverished villagers and slum dwellers in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa--records that track penny by penny how specific households manage their money. The stories of these families are often surprising and inspiring. Most poor households do not live hand to mouth, spending what they earn in a desperate bid to keep afloat. Instead, they employ financial tools, many linked to informal networks and family ties. They push money into savings for reserves, squeeze money out of creditors whenever possible, run sophisticated savings clubs, and use microfinancing wherever available. Their experiences reveal new methods to fight poverty and ways to envision the next generation of banks for the "bottom billion." Indispensable for those in development studies, economics, and microfinance, Portfolios of the Poor will appeal to anyone interested in knowing more about poverty and what can be done about it.
The paper discusses two common scenarios in which evaluators must conduct impact evaluations when working under budget, time, or data constraints. Under the first scenario the evaluator is not called in until the project is already well advanced, and there is a tight deadline for completing the evaluation, frequently combined with a limited budget and without access to baseline data. Under the second scenario the evaluator is called in early, but for budget, political, or methodological reasons it is not possible to collect baseline data on a control group and sometimes not even on the project population. As a result of these constraints, many of the basic principles of impact evaluation design (comparable pretest-posttest design, control group, instrument development and testing, random sample selection, control for researcher bias, thorough documentation of the evaluation methodology, etc.) are often sacrificed. We describe the “Shoestring Evaluation” approach which is being developed to provide tools for ensuring the highest quality evaluation possible under constraints of limited budget, time and data availability. While most of the data collection and analysis techniques will be familiar to experienced evaluators, what is new is the combination of these techniques into an integrated six-step approach which covers: (1) planning and scoping the evaluation, (2-4) options for dealing with constraints related to costs, time and data availability (which could include reconstructing baseline conditions and control groups), (5) identifying the strengths and weaknesses (threats to validity and adequacy) of the evaluation design, and (6) taking measures to address the threats and strengthen the evaluation design and conclusions. When necessary, many of these corrective measures can be introduced at a very late stage, even when the draft evaluation report has already been produced. Although the approach was designed to assist evaluators working in developing countries, the principles are equally applicable for conducting evaluations under similar constraints in industrial nations. Case studies are included to illustrate the different Shoestring approaches, drawing from the authors’ experience in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The paper presents the results from an assessment study of eight e-government projects from India. The assessment framework measured the total value delivered by a project to various stakeholders on three dimensions: (a) cost to clients for accessing services; (b) perception of quality of service and governance; and (c) agency cost and revenue. Data was collected from randomly selected users encapsulating their experience of using the computerized and manual systems. Impact was estimated as the difference between the rating of the computerized and the manual systems. Citizens indicated an overwhelming preference for computerized service delivery. The number of trips required to be made to the concerned offices reduced significantly and waiting time came down by nearly fifty percent. Overall impact showed wide variations across projects. Of the seven agencies where corruption was reported in the manual system, five services saw significant reduction through computerization but the impact was marginal in three projects. Government of India has adopted the framework used in this study to assess the impact of 40 projects implemented at the national, state and local levels. Paper discusses the implications of the results for further development of e-government projects in India and identifies the limitations of the study.
The paper discusses two common scenarios in which evaluators must conduct impact evaluations when working under budget, time, or data constraints. Under the first scenario the evaluator is not called in until the project is already well advanced, and there is a tight deadline for completing the evaluation, frequently combined with a limited budget and without access to baseline data. Under the second scenario the evaluator is called in early, but for budget, political, or methodological reasons it is not possible to collect baseline data on a control group and sometimes not even on the project population. As a result of these constraints, many of the basic principles of impact evaluation design (comparable pretest–posttest design, control group, instrument development and testing, random sample selection, control for researcher bias, thorough documentation of the evaluation methodology, etc.) are often sacrificed. We describe the “Shoestring Evaluation” approach which is being developed to provide tools for ensuring the highest quality evaluation possible under constraints of limited budget, time and data availability. While most of the data collection and analysis techniques will be familiar to experienced evaluators, what is new is the combination of these techniques into an integrated six-step approach which covers: (1) planning and scoping the evaluation, (2–4) options for dealing with constraints related to costs, time and data availability (which could include reconstructing baseline conditions and control groups), (5) identifying the strengths and weaknesses (threats to validity and adequacy) of the evaluation design, and (6) taking measures to address the threats and strengthen the evaluation design and conclusions. When necessary, many of these corrective measures can be introduced at a very late stage, even when the draft evaluation report has already been produced. Although the approach was designed to assist evaluators working in developing countries, the principles are equally applicable for conducting evaluations under similar constraints in industrial nations. Case studies are included to illustrate the different Shoestring approaches, drawing from the authors’ experience in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
"Billions of government dollars, and thousands of charitable organizations and NGOs, are dedicated to helping the world's poor. But much of the work they do is based on assumptions that are untested generalizations at best, flat out harmful misperceptions at worst. Banerjee and Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Their work transforms certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning, that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low. Throughout, the authors emphasize that life for the poor is simply not like life for everyone else: it is a much more perilous adventure, denied many of the cushions and advantages that are routinely provided to the more affluent"--
The use of mobile phones is an increasingly important part of development efforts particularly in low income countries. Investment in mobiles for development (m-development) is being led by the mobile phone industry together with donors and development partners across a wide range of development sectors. As adoption of mobile phones increases it becomes important to research and understand their impact, and to assess to what extent the expansion of m-development is assisting broader development efforts. This paper provides guidance for conducting research on impact assessment for m-development by reviewing 18 published impact studies, and suggests four key building blocks for good practice in impact assessment. These building blocks encompass: the extent to which the studies address the needs of defined audiences or beneficiaries, the choice of types of impact to assess and units of assessment, the application of suitable conceptual frameworks, and the rigor of the methodology followed. The findings suggest that m-development impact assessment to date falls into three main categories: purely quantitative approaches rooted in information economics, and purely qualitative approaches rooted in social impact assessment. A further mixed method category provides cost effective and timely findings, but with the result of diluting the rigor evident at the methodological poles. Overall, the paper concludes there is a need for more and better guidance for the conduct of such studies, in relation to identifying the rationale and objectives, and linking the choice of concepts and methods with the requirements of key audiences and beneficiaries. The paper identifies m-development impact research as a contested area, and by taking stock of experience thus far, seeks to raise the level of debate concerning the relative merit of alternative methodological and conceptual approaches.
Supporting gender equality in the deployment of and access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) involves accepting that gender rela-tions and ICTs within any given community are continuously being shaped by one another. There is a growing body of research on gender and ICTs in the developing world. However, little empirical evidence exists on how certain as-pects of gender relations can inºuence the ways that ICTs are perceived and used, framings which can, in turn, reinforce or reshape existing gender norms and practices. This article examines the relationships that exist between gendered access to education and the ways in which mobile phones, ªxed phones, and the Internet are perceived and used in a rural and an urban Bhu-tanese community. The ªndings, organized by levels of literacy, reveal similar patterns in ICT perceptions and use across the two communities.
The potential of electronic banking (e-banking) and electronic money (e-money) to improve efficiencies, reduce transactional costs and bring new opportunities has long been recognized (Basel, 1998). Greater interest has been generated with new forms of e-money that is transmitted with the aid of mobile phones. Interest in the area of ICT and Development field is with reaching the unbanked, and people at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). This includes the potential to provide them with banking-related services through mobile banking (m-banking) and mobile money (m-money) (Soriano & Barbin 2007; Bångens & Söderberg, 2008), which can be done by capitalizing on the rapid diffusion of mobile phones among social networks including the BOP (Zainudeen, 2008). The unbanked require efficient utilization of varying sources of cash inflows. Living off a cash-based economy, they receive irregular income from occasional jobs, farm produce, and “welfare” (Bångens & Söderberg, 2008). Their limited access to established financial channels exposes them to financial risks and less secure transactions.
Achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty will require simultaneous action on two separate fronts: helping poor people escape from poverty, and stemming the flow of people into poverty. This article examines forty Peruvian communities, and finds that descents into poverty have occurred alongside escapes in every one of them. Escape and descent are asymmetric in terms of reasons: while one set of reasons is responsible for escapes from poverty, another and different set of reasons is associated with descent. Making progress in poverty reduction will require measures to accelerate escapes whilst at the same time slowing down descents. The article looks at the different policies which will be required to serve these two separate purposes.
There is considerable speculation about the correlation between investments in telecommunications and economic development. Mobile phones, by virtue of their role as carriers and conduits of information, ought to lessen the information asymmetries in markets, thereby making rural and undeveloped markets more efficient. This research tests this assumption using a case-study from India, where the fishing community in the south-western state of Kerala has adopted mobile phones in large numbers. We find that with the wide-spread use of mobile phones, markets become more efficient as risk and uncertainty are reduced; there is greater market integration; there are gains in productivity and in the Marshallian surplus (sum of consumer and producer surplus); and price dispersion and price fluctuations are reduced. The potential efficiencies are, however, subject to easy access to capital, without which the market remains less efficient than it could be. Finally, the quality of life of the fishermen improves as they feel less isolated, and less at risk in times of emergencies
Technical Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) research lacks appropriate research methods along the entire development lifecycle spanning design, development, deployment, evaluation and monitoring. Mobile HCI has a great set of research methods that have proven their suitability in mobile research. However, applying Mobile HCI research methods unchanged in technical ICTD will fail due to the specific cultural, infrastructural and governmental context of developing countries. In this workshop we want to bring together people who are active in Mobile HCI and ICTD research to elaborate on Mobile HCI methods and discuss their application for technical ICTD.
The concept of embeddedness has general applicability in the study of economic life and can alter theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of economic behaviors. Argues that in modern industrial societies, most economic action is embedded in structures of social relations. The author challenges the traditional economic theories that have both under- and oversocialized views of the conception of economic action and decisions that merge in their conception of economic actors atomized (separated) from their social context. Social relations are assumed to play on frictional and disruptive, not central, roles in market processes. There is, hence, a place and need for sociology in the study of economic life. Productive analysis of human action requires avoiding the atomization in the extremes of the over- and undersocialized concepts. Economic actors are neither atoms outside a social context nor slavish adherents to social scripts. The markets and hierarchies problem of Oliver Williamson (with a focus on the question of trust and malfeasance) is used to illustrate the use of embeddedness in explicating the proximate causes of patterns of macro-level interest. Answers to the problem of how economic life is not riddled with mistrust and malfeasance are linked to over- and undersocialized conceptions of human nature. The embeddedness argument, on the contrary, stresses the role of concrete personal relations and networks (or structures) in generating trust and discouraging malfeasance in economic life. It finds a middle way between the oversocialized (generalized morality) and undersocialized (impersonal institutional arrangements) approaches. The embeddedness approach opens the way for analysis of the influence of social structures on market behavior, specifically showing how business relations are intertwined with social and personal relations and networks. The approach can easily explain what looks otherwise like irrational behavior. (TNM)
The field of information systems is premised on the centrality of
information technology in everyday socio-economic life. Yet, drawing
on a review of the full set of articles published in Information
Systems Research (ISR) over the past ten years, we argue that the
field has not deeply engaged its core subject matterâthe information
technology (IT) artifact. Instead, we find that IS researchers tend
to give central theoretical significance to the context (within which
some usually unspecified technology is seen to operate), the discrete
processing capabilities of the artifact (as separable from its context
or use), or the dependent variable (that which is posited to be affected
or changed as technology is developed, implemented, and used). The
IT artifact itself tends to disappear from view, be taken for granted,
or is presumed to be unproblematic once it is built and installed.
After discussing the implications of our findings, we propose a research
direction for the IS field that begins to take technology as seriously
as its effects, context, and capabilities. In particular, we propose
that IS researchers begin to theorize specifically about IT artifacts,
and then incorporate these theories explicitly into their studies.
We believe that such a research direction is critical if IS research
is to make a significant contribution to the understanding of a world
increasingly suffused with ubiquitous, interdependent, and emergent
information technologies.
A survey in Kigali, Rwanda, suggests that mobiles are allowing microentrepreneurs to develop new business contacts. The results detail the impact of mobile ownership on the social networks of microentrepreneurs in lowteledensity areas, focusing on the evolving mix of business and personal calls made by users. The study differentiates between the contacts amplified through mobile ownership (friends and family ties) and those enabled by mobile ownership (new business ties). The article discusses applicability of the results to settings beyond Rwanda.
There is considerable speculation about the correlation between investments in telecommunications and economic development. Yet, there has been very little research on whether there is a connection between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and economic growth, and if indeed a connection can be established, how it works. Vast populations in developing countries live in rural areas and are subject to the vagaries of their highly inefficient markets. Mobile phones, by virtue of their role as carriers and conduits of information, ought to lessen the information asymmetries in markets, thereby making rural and undeveloped markets more efficient. This article tests this assumption using a case-study from India, where the fishing community in the southwestern state of Kerala has adopted mobile phones in large numbers.Using mobile phones at sea, fishermen are able to respond quickly to market demand and prevent unnecessary wastage of catch-fish being a highly perishable commodity-a common occurrence before the adoption of phones. At the marketing end, mobile phones help coordinate supply and demand, and merchants and transporters are able to take advantage of the free flow of price information by catering to demand in undersupplied markets. There is also far less wastage of time and resources in all segments of the fishing community. Fishermen spend less time idling on shore and at sea, whereas owners and agents go to the landing centers only when they receive information (via mobile phones) that their boats are about to dock. We find that with the widespread use of mobile phones, markets become more efficient as risk and uncertainty are reduced. There is greater market integration; there are gains in productivity and in the Marshallian surplus (sum of consumer and producer surplus); and price dispersion and price fluctuations are reduced. The potential efficiencies are, however, subject to easy access to capital, especially at the production end of the supply chain, without which the market remains less efficient than it could be. Finally, the quality of life of the fishermen improves as they feel less isolated and less at risk in emergencies. (c) 2007 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This paper discusses the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the development of clusters of small export-orientated enterprises in the Red River Delta region of northern Vietnam. Using the cluster concept, it argues that the many dormant small-scale industry clusters found in developing countries could be transformed into more vibrant entities through the adoption of ICTs. The penetration of these technologies in the export-oriented and private-enterprise sector in the Delta was found to be quite significant. The paper discusses the implications of the empirical findings and suggests a reconsideration of policy issues concerning the adoption of ICTs to foster Vietnam's economic development. Copyright (c) 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The paper investigates the proposition that complementarities exist between information technologies and public health promotion. The results of the cross-country analysis indicate that an increase in the stock of telecommunications infrastructure is positively correlated with an improved health status of the population. To integrate more realism into the macrolevel analysis, the paper utilizes household surveys conducted in two emerging market economies: Bangladesh and Laos. The analysis at the household level shows that a basic telephone service offers opportunities in delivering timely information on health services to households with relatively greater demand for this type of information. Telephone access is also associated with an increased demand for telecommunications infrastructure and medical facilities. (c) 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.