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Intervention or Collaboration ? Rethinking Information and Communication Technologies for Development
Abstract
Over the past decades information system developers and knowledge engineers in ICT projects in wealthy regions of the world have come to realize that technical work can only be successful when situated in a broader organizational context. However, for low-resource environments (such as for example rural Africa), where contextual embedding is even more demanding given the complexity of these environments, practical, context-oriented methodologies how to "do" information systems engineering are still lacking. This book presents a new and comprehensive set of methods that covers the complete lifecycle of information systems engineering, with emphasis on context analysis, needs assessment and use case and requirements analysis.
This book can be used as a practical guide to designing, building and deploying information and communication technologies for development. It can be used by students and practitioners (in the development sector or in ICT business). It can inform policymakers and people interested in international development and technology. It gives a basic but thorough insight in how to develop information systems and services for people in low resource environments, from a socio-technical, information systems engineering perspective.
... In recent years a large number of projects, usually financed by states or international agencies, in the field of ICT for socio-economic development, have been considered failures (Group, 2011). The failure of these projects is generally attributed to a lack of adaptation of these technologies to the real needs of local users and their context (e.g., Bon, 2019). In terms of social inclusion, the design of adapted technologies is essential for their success (Waugaman, 2016). ...
... For the design and implementation of a practical and reflective education in the area of ICTs for Development, focused on the users and their community, a framework is presented that combines service learning (Bringle and Hatcher, 1996) with a theoretical framework that comes from sociotechnical action research, called "ICT4D 3.0". (Bon et al., 2016;Bon, 2019). ICT4D 3.0 is based on the participatory action research (PAR) methodology and philosophy, see for example (Freire, 1970(Freire, /2005Fals Borda, 1979). ...
... For the sociotechnical education, a theoretical framework has been developed, called ICT4D 3.0 (Bon et al., 2016;Bon, 2019). This framework has similarities with CSL, offering methods that contribute to inclusion, innovation (Von Hippel, 2005), and socio-technical development. ...
An educational method that prepares the student to face the real-world complex realities in solidarity and equity is found in the pedagogy known as Community Service Learning (CSL). This pedagogy combines academic learning with real-world community service tasks. In CSL students actively participate in innovation projects, collaborating with communities in order to meet their needs within the complex reality of their multi-faceted environment. In this article, we discuss CSL as a pedagogical model for inclusive education in the academic curriculum in information and communication technologies. This model has two objectives: (i) to train students in socio-technical development methods, making them aware of their social and civic responsibility to face complex realities of the real world; (ii) to develop inclusive technologies that serve the needs of underprivileged communities and connect them to the computerized society. We exemplify this by discussing the design, experiences, results and evaluation of CSL postgraduate courses in Information Sciences in rural areas of Sarawak, Malaysia.
... In recent years a large number of projects, usually financed by states or international agencies, in the field of ICT for socio-economic development, have been considered failures (Group, 2011). The failure of these projects is generally attributed to a lack of adaptation of these technologies to the real needs of local users and their context (e.g., Bon, 2019). In terms of social inclusion, the design of adapted technologies is essential for their success (Waugaman, 2016). ...
... For the design and implementation of a practical and reflective education in the area of ICTs for Development, focused on the users and their community, a framework is presented that combines service learning (Bringle and Hatcher, 1996) with a theoretical framework that comes from socio-technical action research, called "ICT4D 3.0". (Bon et al., 2016;Bon, 2019). ICT4D 3.0 is based on the participatory action research (PAR) methodology and philosophy, see for example (Freire, 1970(Freire, /2005Fals Borda, 1979). ...
... For the sociotechnical education, a theoretical framework has been developed, called ICT4D 3.0 (Bon et al., 2016;Bon, 2019). This framework has similarities with CSL, offering methods that contribute to inclusion, innovation (Von Hippel, 2005), and socio-technical development. ...
Inclusive education is the endeavor to ensure access to quality education for all - independent of social and economic status, family wealth, geographical location, race, ethnicity, gender, age, culture, or language. This is a longstanding but still very pressing concern world-wide, as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 4)
unambiguously point out. This book brings together a wealth of material on current trends and issues in inclusive education. Many factors and forces are at play here. Some reside inside the local, regional and national educational systems, such as obstacles in availability and quality of teaching staff and education infrastructure, and appropriate ways to cater for them. But there are also factors and forces originating from the outside, leading to an intertwined complex of political, cultural, economic, financial, judicial, legal, and democratic issues and considerations.
This book critically documents this for today's globalizing world. A unique feature is that it does so in particular from a Latin American perspective, thereby covering a wide variety of contexts, peoples and countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras,
Mexico, Paraguay), whose voices are often not well heard in international educational and academic communities and policy circles. Resulting from a unique collaboration of more than twenty Higher Education Institutions from Latin America with European universities, this volume presents the English companion edition of the book in Spanish entitled Cultura, Ciudadanía, Participación - Perspectivas de la Educación Inclusiva, edited by Anna Bon and Mónica Pini, both published simultaneously.
The strong interactions between the local and the global are striking. There is a hard struggle everywhere, locally and nationally, to get needed human and infrastructural resources in place. As it emerges from the various chapters of the book, many local cultural and social specifics are to be taken into account. At the same time, it appears that in many places there is a trend of neoliberal privatization and profit-oriented commercialization of education, which tends to produce and reproduce growing inequalities in society that counteract achieving inclusiveness in education. This is only one of the aspects that make the Latin American experiences and perspectives recognizable and highly relevant globally.
... In particular, there has been already for a long time a small but steady stream of action research [23]. In ICT4D, published action research comprises, a.o., longstanding work from Oslo in Health Information Systems in several countries [24], in South Africa in a variety of domains [25][26][27], and from Amsterdam related to rural development (regreening [14]) in the Sahel [28,29]. Action research represents a family of approaches, but in development (the D of ICT4D) it has a clear genealogy dating back to the work of (critical social theorists in their own right as) Fals Borda [30], Freire [31], and Chambers [32]. ...
... For example, Braa et al. [33,34] invoke complexity theory to achieve a better understanding of the `networks of action' involved in health IS in developing countries. As another example, Bon [29] employs network complexity theory and discusses smallholder and family farmer innovation in 4 the Sahel [14] and the roles of ICTs in scaling communication and knowledge sharing between smallholder farmers both as a Complex Adaptive System (CAS). ...
... Here, however, state-of-the-art academic ICT4D/IS research has as yet not succeeded in providing concrete handles for such collaborative and dialogical processes in the field. In our work (e.g., [28,29]) we have therefore endeavoured to bridge this gap between theory and practice, by providing practical ICT4D methodologies that work and have been tested in a way useful to ICT4D practitioners and students new to the field. ...
In recent years, critical research literature in ICT4D has grown. It is widely accepted that theory is to inform practice. However, the inverse directionality, practice informs theory, is much less present in ICT4D, including in critical research. In this paper, we discuss ways how ICT4D research and theory may be better informed by practice—in terms of (i) recognizing praxis-oriented research paradigms and integrating their results, (ii) development of foundational theories, (iii) critical analysis of ICT4D emerging policies, and (iv) positioning ICT4D in the wider development debate. This suggests several elements or directions in which critical research has the potential to push current boundaries of ICT4D in terms of content as well as relevance.
The Digital Divide is commonly associated with those parts of the world where access to Internet and Web is poor or lacking. However, even in places such as the city of Amsterdam, where Internet infrastructure and access are commonplace, a Digital Divide exists. A significant part of the population (1 out of 5) is currently de facto excluded, for a variety of reasons including poverty, low literacy, lack of digital skills, problems with speaking and reading the official language (Amsterdam, a city of under 1 million, hosts 180 different nationalities), and homelessness. This book is based on several community-oriented Participatory Action Research projects by Information Science master students and staff at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. It considers in depth the Digital Divide in an advanced metropolitan context and, even more importantly, lays out practical ways and solutions showing what can be done against digital inequalities and social exclusion in society -- one of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
A growing interest in living labs as a mechanism for innovation has drawn significant attention to both the different flavours of this methodology and to the organizations that put it into practice. However, little has been done to assess its impact and to compare its contribution to other innovation methodologies. This article aims to cover that gap by summarizing the most common European living labs approaches and positioning them in the landscape of user-contributed innovation methodology. The merits and appropriateness of living labs in these settings are also assessed.
African Traditional Medicine (ATM) is widely used in Africa as the first-line of treatment thanks to its accessibility and affordability. However, the lack of formalization of this knowledge can lead to safety issues and malpractice. This paper investigates a possible contribution of the Semantic Web in realizing the formalization and integration of ATM with data on conventional medicine (CM). As a proof of concept we convert various ATM datasets and link them to CM data. This results in a Linked ATM knowledge graph. We finally give some examples with some interesting SPARQL queries and insightful results.
A new framework for assessing the role of information and communication technologies in development that draws on Amartya Sen's capabilities approach.
Information and communication technologies (ICTs)—especially the Internet and the mobile phone—have changed the lives of people all over the world. These changes affect not just the affluent populations of income-rich countries but also disadvantaged people in both global North and South, who may use free Internet access in telecenters and public libraries, chat in cybercafes with distant family members, and receive information by text message or email on their mobile phones. Drawing on Amartya Sen's capabilities approach to development—which shifts the focus from economic growth to a more holistic, freedom-based idea of human development—Dorothea Kleine in Technologies of Choice? examines the relationship between ICTs, choice, and development.
Kleine proposes a conceptual framework, the Choice Framework, that can be used to analyze the role of technologies in development processes. She applies the Choice Framework to a case study of microentrepreneurs in a rural community in Chile. Kleine combines ethnographic research at the local level with interviews with national policy makers, to contrast the high ambitions of Chile's pioneering ICT policies with the country's complex social and economic realities. She examines three key policies of Chile's groundbreaking Agenda Digital: public access, digital literacy, and an online procurement system. The policy lesson we can learn from Chile's experience, Kleine concludes, is the necessity of measuring ICT policies against a people-centered understanding of development that has individual and collective choice at its heart.
In Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth. Noting that most design—from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments—currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argues for the development of an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches. Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human experience based on the radical interdependence of all beings. Mapping autonomous design’s principles to the history of decolonial efforts of indigenous and Afro-descended people in Latin America, Escobar shows how refiguring current design practices could lead to the creation of more just and sustainable social orders.
Community participation in ICT-for-development (ICT4D) is sometimes portrayed as a ‘magic bullet’, which will inevitably lead to better project outcomes and the empowerment of marginalised participants from the local community. This paper takes a critical approach to participation, drawing on dual roots of participation in Development Studies and Information Systems, to consider whether apparently successful ICT4D projects, that follow best-practice for participation, are also succeeding in longer-term participant and community empowerment. The paper identifies issues and success factors relevant to participatory ICT4D and its potentially empowering role for local communities; explores the relevance of these factors to the reality of ICT4D projects in developing countries; and investigates the potential for producing an analytical framework that incorporates a project design approach that could help practitioners in the field incorporate empowerment objectives.
In spite of almost three decades of efforts in the domain of Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD), the validity and effectiveness of the relationship between ICT and D (Development) are not clear, perhaps due to a lack of a comprehensive framework for evaluating ICTD interventions. Comprehensive evaluation of ICTD interventions is, however, difficult as its outcomes are often intangible in nature. The aim of this paper is to develop a comprehensive evaluation framework for ICTD interventions with a specific focus on “D” aspects of these interventions. This work does not focus only on “impact” evaluation of ICTD interventions but also considers other key aspects of project life cycle in the evaluation process. To develop this framework, we draw inspirations from the domains of “program evaluation” and “IS evaluation” and further refine it with learnings from previous ICTD studies. The result of this exercise is a four-stage framework with each stage containing details of assessment points and key considerations that need to be covered in the context of an ICTD intervention. The framework is then validated using an existing case study drawn from the ICTD literature. The applicability and benefits of the framework are then discussed in the light of this case study.