Florence N. Kivunike

Perceptions of the role of ICT on quality of life in rural communities in Uganda

The role of information and communication technology (ICT) in enabling various development goals including the millennium development goals and ultimately human development is no longer disputed. Emphasis is now being placed on optimizing ICT benefits on the quality of life (QoL) of people, especially in developing countries. To address this need, this paper reports a study that applied Sens capability approach to explore how individuals in rural communities in Uganda perceived the importance of ICT toward their QoL and how this perception influenced ICT adoption. It was established that while perception was inclined to social benefits, ICT uptake and use toward improved QoL is still limited. One reasonable conclusion is therefore that state and policymakers should adopt a pluralistic approach to ICT provision: one that does not only focus on availability and affordability, but also considers expanding peoples awareness and agency for development benefit. ICT investments otherwise have a high risk of being severely underutilized.

Using a Structured Approach to Evaluate ICT4D : Healthcare Delivery in Uganda

Using a case from the healthcare delivery sector, we demonstrate how a structured evaluation approach can facilitate the measurement of actual ICT contributions in various contexts. Typically, such are intricate due to the complexities inherent in the environments, making it difficult to evaluate the relationship between ICT and the benefits it intends to achieve to a reasonable degree. The approach suggested in this paper tries to partly remedy some of these complications, by facilitating qualitative data elicitations, aggregation, analysis and evaluation. To make this computationally meaningful, a decision support tool for handling numerically imprecise information is used for the data analysis and evaluation details. The results of this indicate that such an approach makes at least some meaningful input for practitioners and policymakers. In comparison to the qualitative in‐depth approaches this approach facilitates a one‐point in time assessment, which is less resource intensive, but provides prompt and substantial insight on the development performance of ICT4D initiatives. A similar approach would also be applicable to different sectors, and can utilize a broader scope of criteria, as well as incorporate views from several categories of stakeholders.

Validating a Structured ICT for Development Evaluations Approach

The use of structured evaluation approaches, especially those that rely on qualitative criteria for the appraisal of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) contribution to development, is a fairly new occurrence, whose relevance to research and practice is to a large extent unclear. For this purpose, this paper proposes and applies a multidimensional validation framework that is based on the validation square framework initially developed for the evaluation of design methods. It is applied to validate an evaluations approach developed for appraisal of the ICT contribution to social and economic development. Based on the proposed validation framework it is established that despite some skepticism, the structured approach is generally useful for the evaluation of the ICT contribution to development because (i) its underlying theoretical basis demonstrates its likelihood to facilitate evaluations of the ICT contribution to development; (ii) in comparison to the existing approaches, using the structured evaluation approach will most probably produce results in less time and less cost; and finally (iii) it is useful in a variety of contexts.