Proceedings IFIP 9.4 1st Virtual Conference 2021

Abstract

CONFERENCE THEME: RESILIENT ICT4D

The COVID-19 emergency has posed a heavy burden on health infrastructures in the developing world. As an unprecedented crisis, the pandemic has had severe social, redistributional and economic impacts on vulnerable groups, affecting the development processes that the IFIP Working Group 9.4 on Implications of Information and Digital Technologies for Development has traditionally dealt with. With the new disease posing a development challenge for all nations, a global development paradigm (Oldekop et al., 2020) emerged in studying responses to it. In the spirit of “making a better world” with ICTs that characterises the ethos of ICT4D (Walsham, 2012), engagements with such responses have interested our research during the pandemic.

At the same time, ICT4D research on topics different from the ongoing crisis is itself influenced by the pandemic in diverse ways. Planning and conducting fieldwork in the forms we knew it became impracticable, with researchers having to resort to alternative ways to access respondents and field sites. Conferencing, and with it the interactions that are crucial to our academic growth have abruptly moved to the digital world, with new affordances (such as abating barriers of cost and travel) but also new constraints, connected to the digital recreation of a traditionally physical world. Resilience, seen with Heeks and Ospina (2019) as the ability of systems to cope with external shocks and trends, became crucial to us as ICT4D colleagues, both in the conduct of research and in the interactional aspects of our lives as academic community.

Against this backdrop, a Resilient ICT4D is what has emerged from the COVID-19 crisis, and the theme inspiring our Virtual IFIP 9.4 Conference on Implications of Information and Digital Technologies for Development to take place on 26-28 May 2021. While pertaining to themes of ICT4D research in and beyond the pandemic, the tracks in the conference are underpinned by the need for a resilient attitude that, in the face of one of the greatest shocks ever suffered by humanity, keeps alive the spirit of “making a better world” with ICTs.

References
Heeks, R., & Ospina, A. V. (2019). Conceptualising the link between information systems and resilience: A developing country field study. Information Systems Journal, 29(1), 70-96.
Oldekop, J. A., Horner, R., Hulme, D., Adhikari, R., Agarwal, B., Alford, M., Heeks, R. & Zhang, Y. F. (2020). COVID-19 and the case for global development. World Development, 134, 105044.
Walsham, G. (2012). Are we making a better world with ICTs? Reflections on a future agenda for the IS field. Journal of Information Technology, 27(2), 87-93.