ICTlogy

Notes from the IPID ICT4D PG symposium 2008, Mekrijärvi Research Station, Joensuu University, Finland. 8 and 9 September, 2008.

Nelson Godfried Agyemang, University of Pretoria: A Sustainability Framework for Advanced ICT Education in a Developing country

Nelson Godfried Agyemang

How to make sustainable Postgraduate in ICT education programmes in developing countries.

Action research methodology.

Kurt Lewin’s iterative process: diagnose, action planning, action taking, evaluating, specifying learning.

Important point: not to take research for consultancy.

Different sustainability stages: outcomes, processes, context, etc.

In the digitizing sustainability, not everything can be digitized.

Tersia Gowases, University of Joensuu: Impacts of Higher Education Institutions of an Information Society

Background: Edulink fosters ICT development in Africa. Its objective is to foster capacity building and regional integration in higher education in ACP States and Regions, and to promote higher education as a means of reducing poverty.

In this framework, see what’s the role of the combination of Higher Education and Computer Science (e.g. degrees in computer science).

Perspectives: technological, economical, occupational, spatial, cultural.

Joseph M Longino, Lappeenranta University of Technology: Evaluation of Implementation of BSc IT curriculum at Tumaini University

The “C” in ICTs, as a difference with IT.

Background of ICT in Tanzania: post independence situation, development of ICT in Higher Education Institutions, public sector and SMEs reforms to include ICTs. ICTs have been really useful for SMEs to access remote information.

International standard curricula bodies for Computer Science: IFIP, UNESCO.

Curricula models and development: IEEE & ACM (1991 & 2001), UNESCO (1999).

Create a curriculum for a Bsc IT, following the six principles as input: contextualization, international recognition, project based, practical orientation, research based, interdisciplinary orientation.

Challenges: to move ICTs from entertainment to promoting change, by meeting social expectations in an efficient use.

Haider Abbas, Asad Raza, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden: Security Evaluation of ESAM Software

How to do security evaluation using Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM)? How to promote time/cost-effective security evaluation of Software Architectures in developing countries?

Security is considered a cost overhead in developing countries and so is often left unattended.

A new framework based on ESAM Software to make it easier.

Carolina Islas, University of Joensuu: Playing and Sharing knowledge through the use of portable devices, formally known as Mobile Phones

How is gaming and sharing knowledge relevant for ICT4D? Knowledge sharing for development.

Development according to Van Wagner: the growth of humans throughout the lifespan.

SECI model: socialization, externalization, combination, internalization. This is what happens in the sequence of gaming from a scenario towards a goal.

If we can shift content and education to the mobile zone arena — being mobile phones the most evenly distributed ICTs — then we can make some broad impact in knowledge shared based development. Mobile pervasive gaming is a vehicle to support learning.

Notes from the IPID ICT4D PG symposium 2008, Mekrijärvi Research Station, Joensuu University, Finland. 8 and 9 September, 2008.

Edephonce N. Nfuka, Stockholm University: A Holistic Approach for IT Governance in the Public sector Organizations in a Developing Country: A Case Study of Tanzania

What is IT Governance? Business support, IT risks, performance, delivery time, service cost, service quality, etc. Basically, business people have to be aligned with IT people.

A holistic approach covering the following areas of improvement:

• Leadership
• Effective coordination mechanisms
• Reasonable IT investment

Research question: how could IT Governance in the public sector in a developing country be streamlined in order to improve public services delivery? A framework for effective governance:

• ITG Context
• ITG Mechanisms
• ITG Key Decisions
• ITG Maturity
• ITG Problems & Consequences

More info

• Edephonce N. Nfuka A1 and Lazar Rusu Management of IT-enabled change in a public organisation in Tanzania

Marilla Palmen, University of Kuopio: How to develop participatory research methods to assess health information management needs of families with small babies?

Participatory action research approach to help health care workers to improve their work. “My Wellbeing” is an e-health tool (actually in conceptualization phase) for families and individuals to monitor their own health.

Challenges: how to know the user needs? how to know the best way to fit them?

Some approaches to conceptualize this “my wellbeing”

• Health services development
• Information needs assessment, information behaviour, information seeking behaviour, information practices
• Personal information management

Evelyn Kigozi Kahiigi, DSV-Stockholm University: E-learning in the developing country context: Adoption and Utilization at the University Level in Uganda

Ugandan framework for ICT and Education

• ICt acquisition liberalization (1996)
• Rolling out a National Data Backbone
• Growth of the ICT Sector
• Integration of ICT into the curriculum of primary and secondary education
• Integration of ICT in teaching and research in Higher Education
• SchoolNet Uganda, Uganda Connect, Research Network of Uganda

BUT the reality is that there are ICT acceptance issues and limited utilization of ICTs for education: e-mail, LMS to upload notes, and powerpoint presentations to teach. Maybe due to limited access, maybe due to a lack of awareness in the educational framework.

Instead, there is a growing informal e-learning in Uganda: Internet, chats, e-content, mailing lists and chats… This informal e-learning should be exploited.

[this reminds me of Ivan Illich, Sugata Mitra and others about deschooling society and being confident about the ability of children to self-teach themselves when an appropriate framework is provided.]

Niels Peter Nielsen, University of London: Mobile Technology in African Rural Development

Main issues:

• Need for active policies to spread ICTs in rural areas and the benefits of investing in agriculture.
• How does access to mobile technology influence the rural residents bargaining power in the market place?
• How do mobile technologies fulfil social functions in the marketing process? How are issues discussed including and beyond “pure” price negotiations?

Based on action research.

Notes from the IPID ICT4D PG symposium 2008, Mekrijärvi Research Station, Joensuu University, Finland. 8 and 9 September, 2008.

Keynote speech
Tim Unwin: ICT4D – where next?

Tim Unwin

Thoughts on a framework for reflecting on ICT4D

The importance of the D in ICT4D. Predominance of development as “economic growth” and “poverty elimination”. Development definitions should be put in context.

What’s empowerment? Empowerment cannot be exogenous. Habermas’s critical theory as a guide: theory of knowledge constitutive interests. The role of the researcher as the psychoanalyst of the society, to make people (e.g. leaders) think and reflect.

Three main drivers of (new) research:

• From individual focused approaches to communal focused ones
• Avoid technologically driven research interests, and try to think about the most appropriate technology for each context… and this includes going back before the “new” technologies (e.g. electrical power)
• Integrated approach

Towards a critical ICT4D

A focus on needs, avoiding supply led and top down ICT4D projects. Supply and demand need be fitted and put together. And then rely on local institutions, already working, with large tradition, to leverage their legitimacy.

Sustainability has to be put into the equation from the start, not when failure occurs. The goal to be pursued is to find some sustainable project that matches both the interest of the rich (the investors, the international companies) and the poor.

Hence, some good research on needs should be done before engaging in research about the solutions.

Enhance sustainability by taking accessibility into account.

Reflections on research practices

The challenge of multidisciplinary approaches meeting in ICT4D.

Is an empowering agenda compatible with doing (traditional) research / publishing in peer reviewed papers / following “academic” rules?

I’ve been working lately analyzing 47 models that describe — explicitly or implicitly — the Information Society. Some of them speak of access as the existence of infrastructures; other cannot conceive any effective access without capacity (i.e. digital skills); some others do have quite a broad understanding of what access is and include many nondigital/analogue variables to explain their model.

On one hand, all models (or almost) have their reasons: depending on what are your objectives, you are measuring a different thing and/or think of different conceptions of the Information Society — and the digital divide.

On the other hand, the problem is that this is just like speaking in different tongues, a Babel Tower, where quite often people, institutions, projects, indicators and indices, etc. do tell different and incomparable things.

Almost two years ago I draw what I then considered a framework that could gather up all kind of approaches:

I’ve now drawn the following one:

Towards a comprehensive model of the Digital Economy
(click to enlarge)

Economist Jeffrey Sachs signed on August 21 2008 an article at — The digital war on poverty — in which, summing up, he explains that [t]Thanks to market forces, even the world’s poorest people are beginning to benefit from the flow of digital information. Not that I do not agree, in general, with what is explained in his article, but there are some clarifications I’d like to make.

Over all, the tone of the article is optimistic. I am also optimistic about the ends, but not on the actual estate of the situation nowadays. Besides, I’m becoming more sceptic about leapfrogging, which is one of the strong points made by Sachs. Don’t get me wrong: I do believe ICTs are a revolution and will provide renewed energies for those who will be capable of benefiting from them, but I think that ICTs will be catalysts and multipliers (perhaps in several orders of magnitude), but not substitutes.

I’ll try and comment some original statements made in the article one by one, and then gather up some conclusions.

The digital divide is beginning to close

Were this a question, the answer would simply be no. Put short, the inequality in the quantity of existing infrastructures is certainly narrowing. But when we look about quality, the digital divide is actually widening. I’ll be discussing this later, but here come some other articles of mine where I already debated about this issue (in chronological order):

• World Telecommunication/ICT Development Report 2006: digital divide narrowing?
• The Millennium Development Goals Report 2006: ICT and Digital Divide target
• The 2007 e-readiness rankings: comments and critiques

Extreme poverty is almost synonymous with extreme isolation […] [b]ut mobile phones […] will therefore prove to be the most transformative technology

I agree. Mobile technologies (cellphones, wireless, etc.) have a strong power and I also think that they will (they actually are) transforming the society at several levels. But from this sentence we understand — I’m sorry if it is me that got the author wrong — that poverty comes from isolation and, hence, as mobile devices will make isolation disappear, so will poverty.

I agree with Sachs that poverty usually means isolation — I’d say “exclusion” — but this is a consequence of other factors, a symptom, but not (or not always) a cause. So:

• Communication fosters development, but isolation not necessarily leads to (dire) poverty.
• Poverty has many factors, and many of them come from unequal distribution of wealth, unbalanced trade relationships, personal exploitation, etc. And they do happen in spheres of actual communication and not isolation (especially exploitation, by construction).

Mobile phone technology […] costs so little per unit of data transmission

Underdeveloped countries quite often are accompanied by lack of civil rights and concentration of power, which includes, usually, lack of competition in the telecommunications market. This means that prices are not that cheap. In absolute terms. In relative terms, with huge amounts of people living under the threshold of poverty, the prices are anything but cheap (a direct consequence of monopolistic regimes). Of course I agree that they provide cheaper means to exchange knowledge than other technologies, but I’m afraid that, even so, costs are not “so little”.

On the other hand, not only communication services have to be cheap, but also devices. Data transmission requires some devices (e.g. 3G cellphones) that are simply out of reach to 99% of the world population. Of course, I’m talking about rich data, and not SMSs or (in some cases) WAP — remember what we said about quality.

Despite this criticism, there are excellent experiences like Brosdi, Tradenet or (also mentioned by Sachs), M-Pesa, that picture an optimistic future. The final results will depend on how these experiences impact on developing countries and, more important, how fast developed countries are in running their own path… with better technology.

In the following paragraphs, Sachs explains some good examples on how ICTs have changed jobs and employment, business and commercial relationships, Education or the Health system. I agree these are good examples. I agree, too, that convergence is a very good thing, so that same content and services are made available regardless of the place or tool you’re using to access them. In general, I somewhat share his ideal that the end of poverty could be reached would we put all the potential we already have by pointing to that goal.

But the devil is in the details.

In a research I’m just carrying on, I’m finding that (almost) all good performance in indicators from the Digital Economy depends on exogenous factors, on analogue or “real economy” ones: the gross domestic product, education, inequality, freedom, etc. This puts at stake some optimisms about leapfrogging. The idea that the Information Society, Knowledge Based Societies or the Digital Economy can run in parallel from the Industrial Society does not seem backed up by evidence. So, not two parallel lines of development, but a circle is the figure that fits best. A virtuous circle or a vicious one, depending on what sense are you making it spin.

For all the benefits that Sachs speaks of to come, other (deeper) changes must take place too. And it is true, we can provoke and speed up some of these changes by means of ICTs. But to have a rabbit coming out of the hat, someone had to feed it first.

Three years ago I set up ICT4D Courses, a repository where I would be uploading learning materials related to training courses in the field of ICT4D.

After that time, the repository has not grown at all — it was somehow part of my MPhil’s dissertation.

On the other hand, I had recently created ICTlogy Learning Materials Series, a place where to upload the learning materials that I had created.

Now, it does not make sense to be having two different places for the same thing: open educational resources, so I merged them into one. The URLs have not changed, just the respository, that now holds everything concerning open educational resources:

You’ll see it missing from the top menu, but you can always access it at the Bibliography, and then go to Types of Works and Learning Materials.