What are the academic contributions from Africans to the ICT4D field? Why are there so few of them? Only 9% of all articles o nICT for/and development topics come from African institutions (i.e. not African researchers living or working elsewhere.
This poses, at least, a problem in four different dimensions:
Representation.
Validity.
Shaping.
Legitimacy.
Roots of the problem: lack of conference attendance, institutional factors, access to information, publishing culture, political and language bias, strength of the research community.
These issues should be fixed, and a first proposal goes in the line of addressing the resource and institutional issues directly — advocate merit, more and different research incentives, collaboration between universities in Africa to pool resources, etc. — and to find alternative research strategies.
Discussion
Q: Is there any way to address the language issues? A: Journals or events where English is non-mandatory.
Anriette Esterhuysen: What about open access journals? A: Yes, but still open access journals lack the impact of long-established (closed) journals.
A Study of Connectivity in Millennium Villages in Africa Jyotsna Puri, Patricia Mechael, Roxana Cosmaciuc, Daniela Sloninsky, Vijay Modi, Matt Berg, Uyen Kim Huynh, Nadi Kaonga, Seth Ohemeng-Dapaah, Maurice Baraza, Afolayan Emmanuel, Sia Lyimo
Goals: characterize users and owners of mobile phones in rural communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Asess the potential of mobile phones in increasing income, affecting people’s lives, etc.
Methodology: quantitative and qualitative approaches. Quantitative: baseline reading on connectivity; qualitative: understand the impacts of mobile phones after network strengthening. Took place in four Millennium Village Project (MVP) sites in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania.
Many of these areas depend on agricultural production, either crops or sheep/goats.
In-depth interviews were carried on in four sectors to see which were the different uses and influence on their daily lives.
Concerning small businesses, in general, the main impact was to have access to “safety nets”, in the sense of lowering (economic) risks, increase safety, security, strengthen contact with social/community networks, connection to other resources that were out of reach, etc.
Concerning the Health Sector, the main usage was not reporting health data (which was actually the less important one), but they were perceived as an improvement to access health information, to reach other health professionals, improve emergency response, or even to improve health facilities management.
In terms of Education, mobiles were used specially on the managerial site, though there was a desire to use mobiles for educational purposes. Improving management, communicating with teachers or accessing information were the main reasons to use mobiles in the educational sector. It was perceived an increase in enrolment and attendance, and improved management and teacher retention.
Policy implications: People are willing to pay for services, though it strongly depends on purchasing power and perceived usefulness of services. Thus, there is a need to foster these “useful” content and services. To increase the impact of the mobile phone, though, there is a need to improve too the quality of other infrastructures like roads and electricity, that are now hampering the maximized benefits enabled through mobile telephony. To go one step forward and impact health, education, governance, etc. there is though a need to move from mobile telephony to broadband.
Discussion.
Q: How do people pay (cash) for they mobile telephony costs, when money is not the norm in many rural Africa communities? A: That was not surveyed, but it indeed is a problem when many economic deals happen in the informal economy, and when many revenues in cash depend on the season, markets, etc. and are not stables.
Digital and Other Poverties: Exploring the Connection in Four East African Countries Julian May
Are ICTs pro-poor? It does seem so when looking at the private consumption expenditure (PCE), where poor people consume much more than rich ones in ICT in share of expenditures [is that because of quantity? of saturation? of affordability? Not clear…].
Does the use of ICT systema change the level of poverty of households, individuals and communities? Are investments in CIT a viable option for the poor? Questionnaire survey of 1,600 households in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, interviewed twice: 2007/ and 2010. The sampling unit came out of a purposive selection of 20 poorest census Enumerator Areas, being that sample representative of the poorest regions in the selected countries. A 35% of the original sample was unmatched for the second round of interviews due to several reasons, but this finds within reasonable boundaries if attrition is taken into account.
Data shows that between the two periods, poverty was reduced according to well established poverty line measures. Other measures of poverty were used: income, vulnerability, assets, human capital, inclusion, services. A correlation appeared between ICTs and much less poverty in those aspects, with the exception of vulnerability and inclusion, that seem to remain equal independently of access to ICTs.
A logistic regression showed that education and PCE each increase the odds of having access to ICT threefold, and that the interaction between these variables is the dominant cause fo gains in ICT access. A multnomial regression finds that digital poverty is strongly associated with physical poverty and assets. And these associations are unchanged along time.
Gains resulting from ICT access for the most poor are twice as high as those for the non-poor.
The loss of ICT is also new source of shock to the poor. It will take a century for a poor family to call, text, tweet or friend itself out of poverty. Cost and time saving is the dominant mechanism, and managing shocks is the dominant context.
Discussion.
Q: What about the opportunity cost? A: That was not measured, and it is certainly something to be taken into account in further research. In some cases, indeed, and especially in those households just above the poverty line, ICTs might be making them poorer. Data are inconclusive, but this is something to be aware of.
Q: What about not only access to ICTs but capacity to use? A: Interviews showed that most users were highly skilled in the usage of their devices for their specific purposes, indeed being very effective in getting the things they intended to done.
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Decision making and accountability: citizen-centred ICT platforms? Chairs: Lotta Rydström
Case 1
Uganda: several examples on how women are using ICTs and especially their mobile phones to participate in local politics, community life, etc. The main issues are, nevertheless, physical access to devices, illiteracy.
SODNET
SODNET (Social Development Network) works with targeted advocacy, really good data and the right packaging to provide near real time reporting, direct amplification of voices, aggregation of data for ease of analysis and report generation, transparency in organizations, etc.
Given that in Kenya the penetration of the mobile phone is really high, most solutions rely on mobile telephony (and the web too) for them to work.
Approx 25,000 SMS questions/messages vs. 5,000 on the web. An example of the impact was the scandal that was raised on the performance of the Ministry of Water.
A total of 1,523 reports by monitors and citizens on irregularities during the election; 36 out of 40 actionable reports were amplified and responded to by the IIEC (electoral body); 794 reports on “everything is fine”, though there was no requisite to do so.
Key factors:
Provide simple technology /media based tools and channels.
Let citizens act on their own.
This is what is behind the new project Huduma, a project that the Government has asked the possibility to be able to answer the citizens back, from within the same platform. Same with Map Kibera, a “crowdsource” mapping tool.
Johan Hellström
There are many tools where mobile phones are used to track and store information.
There are a lot of corruption indices or ways to measure corruption: TI’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), World Bank’s Corruption Control Index (CCI), Bribe-Payers’ Index (by TI), etc.
ICT actions against corruption: automation (remove the intermediary), transparency, detection, prevention, awareness raising, reporting, deterrence (a real threat to business), promoting ethical attitudes.
A research shows that as the eGovernment index goes up, the Corruption Control Index goes down; GDP/capita up, CCI goes down; free press up leads, notwithstanding, to no significant change. Andersen (2009). E-Government as an anti-corruption strategy.
Q: Do we need more tools? Sodenet: most of the tools are already developed, they just need being customized for your own purposes.
What kind of responses have governments given to these initiatives? A: They increasingly want to be informed and seldom participate in the whole project, especially providing feedback. But sometimes too they get scared or simply mad at these projects.
Where is the limit of transparency (e.g. Wikileaks)?
From digital inclusion to information literacy Chair: Brasilina Passarelli, Daisy Grisolia, Fernanda Scur, Mariana Tavernari — Escola do Futuro
Senior people, though they still use the Internet very little, the fraction of users is increasing very fast in recent years (1% in 2006, 3% in 2009).
Indeed, Internet users become very intensive users and use a broad range of online tools. On the other hand, elderly people going online become more independent and, over all, become more independent when it comes to learning about the Internet.
They use more their computers at home, use the Internet to browse about citizenship and health (which makes them different from other Interent users).
Now, the telecentre has shifted from a place where to go online to a place to gather with their peers.
So, what should be the future of this infocentre/telecentre given the new data?
Discussion
Telecentres/infocentres seem to be fighting for who’s in charge of information literacy, and they should cooperate more.
Michael Downey: Should we force things like infocentres within “ancient” structures? Why not develop something new and organic to support the use of ICTs?
The session splits in groups to discuss these topics. Here are the main aspects that raised in the groups.
What does the increasing penetration of Internet and mobile telephony mean to policies and practices of development? Is “ICTD 2.0” an over-arcing idea, or are these shifts significant and powerful enough to warrant an entirely new model of development?
Simple access statistics do not tell much.
2.0 is about more participation, and we have to find out where the “participation” is in the technologies we are setting up.
Mobile infrastructures are less versatile than fixed ones, and this is a significant issue that has to be taken into account.
How can systematic exclusions of people/ideas/voices from peer production and crowdsourcing of development practices be countered? How should these exclusions inform the ways in which economic, social and political development is enacted?
There is not an established body of successful practices that policy-makers can face on.
The potential of ICTs has to be disclosed and explain, but above all, it has to be leveraged into real change.
Identify who is excluded.
Understand the environment they are embedded in.
Create ways to get them involved.
Ensure change is bidirectional.
What are some of the most and least successful cases of harnessing the power/wisdom of crowds for development work and why?
Philippines and the SMS; Kenya and Ushahidi; the contested “Twitter Revolution” in Iran (depending on how you look a it is or it is not a success); Syria and WikiSyria; the US Presidential Election, etc.
In general, these are initiatives that enabled local feedback. And all of them had embedded a Free/Open Source Software ethos.
What is the role of online social networks or online communities of practice in ICTD 2.0? What are some examples of successful and failed networks and communities? Why did they or didn’t they work? What does it take to make the available online tools useful in a development context?
Social inclusion, meaning that online communities are embedded into offline ones.
We need to represent all voices, including the ones that have no voice (or not online access), all perspectives, all needs.
Improving research theory.
Using social networks that can actually act, that can operate at the real and applied level.
Social networks to lobby and influence existing institutions, not to fight or circumvent them.
James Murphy (Clark University) and Pádraig Carmody (Trinity College Dublin) How can ICT research better inform and communicate theories of development and globalization? New challenges and promising directions
How can we conceptualize the impact of ICT on the relationsihps between palces in the world system?
How can studies of ICT use an d impact better inform theoretical explanations for uneven development and between places?
What theoretical frameworks can help us in better understanding what’s going on in the ICT4D discipline?
The session splits in groups to discuss these topics. Here are the main aspects that raised in the groups.
ICT, indigenous rights, and new global inerconnectivities Moderates: Jenna Burrell
What is the place of indigenous knowledge in the context of discussionas around the global “knowledge society”?
Cross-cultural encounters via ICT: as connectivity extends, how are these efforts to bridge between North ad South turning out?
Indigenous knowledge is usually understood in time and space, but specifically as something about the past, and that latter understanding of “indigenous” is one that should be eradicated.
Indigenous knowledge has been also localized, closed within small communities that have no contact and no impact with larger ones, with universal knowledge. That is something that should be better understood too.
ICT, the global-local nexus, and the political economy of development in the Global South Moderates: Janaki Srinivasan
Studies of ICT-based development initiatives are often based on what Hart calls “impact model” (Hart 2002). Can we move away of this conception of development?
Development should be depoliticized, in the sense of being separated from political power bargains. That would ease the sustainability / sustainable development factor to step in the agenda.
ICT governance is crucial to understand the dynamics of ICTs and development.
We should also focus at the real impact of huge information flows, and see whether they are really empowering people or, instead, concentrating power in a few people’s hands.
Inclusion Moderates: Anita Gurumurthy
Can we understand development differently from turning everything into a commodity?
Indeed, with the excuse of “stakeholderism”, many institutions participate in development without the required transparency and accountability.
The technological change is not governed, and there is a need for it to be, so that the impact of that change is precisely in the intended direction.
Collaboration vs. competition.
Importance of capability and competences when talking about an ICT-mediated society or an ICT-fostered change/development.
Inclusion is mostly about local-level decision making, and this is where ICTs should have an important field to act in.
ICT, uneven development, and spatial integration Moderates: Pádraig Carmody and Jim Murphy
How do ICTs reshape geographies of uneven development? How might ICTs contribute to spatial integration and marginalization, both directly and indirectly? Who are the principals actors and drivers and through what channels?
How might we better conceptualize the ways in which ICT are, or are not, being absorbed into production, marketing, and innovation systemsw in order to better assess whether they are enabling upgrading and more progressive forms of economic globalization?
How can ICTs change power structures? ICTs can be empowering and disempowering.
Is there an overuse of ICTs?
Who trains an educates in the use of ICTs and capabilities that they require?
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Tim Unwin, chairing the session, encourages the speakers to elaborate on the future (10 years ahead) of ICT4D research, what topics, fields, etc. should be on the table.
ICT4D research is too much often disentangled from what practitioners are doing. And when it approaches the field, it is quite often “market analysis” for telecom companies rather than real research.
There is a strong need for deeper analysis and, especially, focus on policy, on strategy. more analytical thinking. And an analysis that is based on hard data that practitioners cannot usually extract and analyse.
Indeed, to reach policy makers, research should also be about blogging, about communicating, about reaching out.
Stop looking at the solution (e.g. mobiles for development) and look instead at the problems (e.g. lack of drinkable water).
Many research is not related with the “community factor” of reality. Thus, it fails at linking the importance of the community with empowerment, solidarity, progress, development.
How we make sense of the models, the numbers, and translate them into real application at the political, democratic, macroeconomic level.
On the other hand, how do we train or engage practitioners in the academic dialogue, in the ethos of research.
How do we measure and look up at data? What should we be looking for to measure impact?
We should make some research that lists the tools to do research and the tools to measure the impact of that research. There also is a need for an organized directory of Who works on ICT4D, where, how. And, a list of projects and their impacts.
We spend too many time isolating the “ICT factor” of projects that work. We should shift the focus to what is the context where these ICTs worked, because that might be the actual success factor.
On the other hand, academics should cluster together and create bigger research groups that somehow stepping out of the structures of Academia. Academics cannot be just reporting on the work that practitioners are doing; they’re behind the curve, amateur journalists, if that is all they do.
Discussion
Q: What happens with ICT governance? Anita Gurumurthy: Definitely the UN should be having a word on that.
Q: What should the role be of local communities in ICT4D? Ken Banks: local communities should be the ones leading the implementation of projects and solutions. Erik Hersman: Indeed, there are many innovations that rise amongst local communities.
Q: We need all components: practitioners, academics, different disciplines and approaches…
Q: There should be bridges between academics and practitioners. The former should be more aware of what happens down on the terrain; the latter should be more knowledgeable about methodology, impact assessment, etc.
Q: There is a big issue in ICT4D concerning non-accessibility for disabled people, including illiterate people that never went to school. The accessibility factor should be urgently addressed in ICT4D research agenda.
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