Looking Beyond ‘Information Provision’: The Importance of Being a Kiosk Operator in the Sustainable Access in Rural India (SARI) Project, Tamil Nadu, India Janaki Srinivasan
How has changed the life of the women that operate information kiosks in India?
Information kiosks provide information on agriculture, prices, government services, etc. especially to reduce information asymmetry in the population.
Do info kiosks actually end up providing information to everybody in a community? (IIITB, 2005)
Does provision of information naturally improved socio-economic conditions? (Gopakumar, 2004)
Is information provision the main role player of info kiosks in practice?
This research puts the stress on the last point.
The project focuses on information asymmetry framed as the problem and information provision as the solution. In this framework, ICTs are the tools that enable the solution.
Kiosk operators have many duties and interactions that go beyond mere service provision: interact with other operators, with elected leaders, with residents, bureaucrats, domain experts, and with the Dhan for meetings and training sessions.
At the e-Government level, the kiosk has several objectives such as information provision (schemes, procedures, records) and improving state-vilage resident interactions (transparency, efficiency).
Outcomes for kiosk operators:
Seeing the state (and other domains) differently: awareness (schemes, procedures, techniques, who’s who), interaction (frequency, diversity, learning by doing, coping, dealing, negotiating).
Being seen by the village differently: status in the community (“girl with the computer”, “girl for certificates”).
Discussion
Q: So, the research showed that there were a lot of unpredicted consequences/outcomes for kiosk operators, but… what happened with the intended outcomes? A: We found that they were not in conflict and, actually, they were mutually reinforced.
The Social Meaning of ICTs: Patterns of Technology Adoption and Usage in Context Cynthia Putnam, Beth Kolko
3 rounds survey (2006, 2007, 2008) in four countries in Central Asia to compare Internet users in that region with US Internet users (using for those data from the Pew Internet Life survey).
Two methodology:
Technology acceptance model (TAM): external variables determine perceived userfulness and ease of use, that determine attitude, intentions and effective usage.
Diffusion of Innovations (DOI): characteristic of the technology, diffusion channels of how technology is communicated, time and social assistance. These issues define 5 characteristics of an innovation: relative advantage, complexity or ease of use, compatibility with existing values, trial-ability and observability.
Data (2008) showed that for Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan most of Internet users were innovators and early adopters, while in the US, at that time (PEW data for 2007) there already were many laggards now using the Internet.
Predictors were calculated with income and other variables and the resultant statistic proved to be a good predictor on who would be online in Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan at a specific time. Internet users share demographic similarities when compared to non-users. On the other hand, usage is also pretty similar between countries and within profiles.
Discussion
Jim Murphy states that there should be much more focus (work) on the context and in the framework where all this technology adoption if framed into.
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Information and Communication Technologies and Development (2010)
Mobile Divides: Gender, Socioeconomic Status, and Mobile Phone Use in Rwanda Joshua Blumenstock, Nathan Eagle
Rwanda: 10M people, 165th in GDP, huge growth in mobile phones in the past decade, now with 1.5M users.
Anonymous call detail records (CDR) were complemented with a structured phone survey.
Results show disparities in access. Phone users are very different from “normal” people. in general, they are the “better off” members of society: better educated, older, larger households, wealthy (roughly twice as wealthy in average).
There are also disparities in use: rich and poor use their phones very differently. Rich ones have been using it almost twice longer than poor one, larger average lenghts of call, rich people are more central to the network, more credit used per day, etc.
Men and women spend the same amount of time on phone per day, but women receive more calls, and each call lasts longer. Women are more likely to share their phone. Same with social networks, but women make more calls to family and fewer to friends or make less business-related calls. On the other hand, though daily mobile baking patterns are similar, men send more money during holidays.
Discussion
Q: Are findings consistent along time? A: There does not seem to be a huge change in major trends and characteristics. Though the research does not have panel data, in general terms the actual findings seem to apply in the past and, very likely, in the nearest future.
Research and Reality: Using Mobile Messages to Promote Maternal Health in Rural India
Divya Ramachandran, Vivek Goswami, John Canny
Global maternal mortality is still very high in many African and Asia countries, topping up to 0.5% in India. How can mobile phones and SMS contribute in reducing these figures?
Messages were designed with a persuasive structure to demystify some wrong believes and encourage pregnant women to follow healthy habits. Messages were accompanied with the personal assistance of a health worker.
Results show than, in comparison with a control group, text messages did have a somewhat positive impact in health workers’ work and in pregnant women. Health workers of the same caste as clients were significantly more persuasive (e.g. they succeeded in making their clients take their iron tablets).
Discussion.
[I would personally like to know whether the control group was a group with no supporting material or a group with alternate (e.g. brochures, television, etc.) support material? If there was not supporting material, why go SMS instead of simply paper? Was the impact, thus, the supporting material or technology? Or the intensive participation/involvement of the researchers in the field?]
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Information and Communication Technologies and Development (2010)
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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Information and Communication Technologies and Development (2010)
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.
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