Sustainability Action Plan and Validation for ICT projects in rural areas of developing Countries
Inés Bebea González
Working in the framework of a huge ICT4D programme run by EHAS Foundation, mainly focused in e-Health for development, linking the primary healthcare system via Wi-Fi in the Amazon.
Measurement of ICT4D project results: appropriateness, efficiency, effectiveness, impact and sustainability. Main hypothesis: Sustainability Action Plan (SAP) implementation will reduce sustainability failure risk of ICT project in Napo, turning this project into success also inters of sustainability.
Several parts of the plans were analyzed:
- The institutional and financial plan, that should lead to institutional change management.
- The operative maintenance plan, based on a historical knowledge of network status and a layered maintenance team.
- The failure diagnosis and incidence management system, following (tech) monitoring protocol standards.
- The continuous learning plan, with the goal to turn information into knowledge, and to avoid the drawbacks of high rotation within staff (see Batchelor, S. and Norrish, P. (2003) Sustainable information and communication technology (ICT). Reading: Gamos).
Data show a risk reduction between 33% and 65% of sustainability failure after application of the sustainability action plan.
Discussion
Q: Two suggestions. The first one, is to leverage the power of the community, especially students in higher education. The second one, is to include a security scheme, which seemed absent in the presentation. A: Definitely, volunteering programmes do apply in this kind of projects.
Usability testing of educational tool for secondary level children: A case of Sura ya UKIMWI
Barun Khanal
e-Learning platform in English and Swahili that has to be effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant and easy to learn (the 5 E’s by Quesenberry, 2001).
Usability is not validation, it has to be embedded into the process, not put at the end. This means including real users and self-criticism
Educational tools deserve a special approach than business or commercial or work context tools.
In usability testing, it is as important as the feedback to analyze how the process itself has been perceived by the users. Many users are just not used to provide feedback, especially structured and formal feedback. Seeing how they react to usuability testing is also a way to test their skills, their perceptions, they cultural framework, how they behave in front of the technology, the usability of the test, etc.
