Jonathan Donner

Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Literature

This paper reviews roughly 200 recent studies of mobile (cellular) phone use in the developing world, and identifies major concentrations of research. It categorizes studies along two dimensions. One dimension distinguishes studies of the determinants of mobile adoption from those that assess the impacts of mobile use, and from those focused on the interrelationships between mobile technologies and users. A secondary dimension identifies a subset of studies with a strong economic development perspective. The discussion considers the implications of the resulting review and typology for future research.

Mobile banking and economic development: linking adoption, impact, and use

Around the globe, various initiatives use the mobile phone to provide financial services to those without access to traditional banks. Relatively little scholarly research explores the use of these m-banking/m-payments systems. This paper calls attention to this gap in the research literature, emphasizing the need for research focusing on the context(s) of m-banking/m-payments use. Presenting illustrative data from exploratory work with small enterprises in urban India, it argues that contextual research is a critical input to effective ‘adoption’ or ‘impact’ research. Further, it suggests that the challenges of linking studies of use to those of adoption and impact reflect established dynamics within the Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) research community. The paper identifies three cross-cutting themes from the broader literature (amplification vs. change, simultaneous causality, and a multi-dimensional definition of trust), each of which can offer increased theoretical clarity to future research on m-banking/m-payments systems.

Blurring Livelihoods and Lives: The Social Uses of Mobile Phones and Socioeconomic Development

tos you might have set to appear as caller ID, the ringtone you have chosen, and the bookmarks or applets you may use to check everything from sports scores to movie times. But mainly, just think of the basic flow of incoming and outgoing calls; chances are, you may have used your handset to call a colleague one moment and your mother the next. Even if you haven’t made any calls today, your phone is probably on, waiting patiently to connect you to the office, to students, to friends, or to family. As technologies go, mobile phones are quite flexible. GSM and CDMA networks provide coverage to homes, to workplaces, even to the wilderness. People carry handsets with them as they move from place to place and between social situations. By enabling and strengthening social and economic relationships at a distance, mobiles shift time and place, and complicate contexts and roles to an even greater degree than the landlines that preceded them. Carrying a mobile invites consideration or even reconfiguration of being “at work,”“in transit,”“at home,” or “at play.” 1 Mobiles blur the lines between livelihoods and lives, and not just among smartphone-wielding information workers. Rather, this blurring can be experienced by almost anyone engaged with work. Around the world, farmers and fishermen, artisans and day laborers, community health workers and primary school teachers are carrying handsets and using them for both productive and personal uses throughout their daily routines. This paper focuses on how this intermingling of lives and livelihoods, as mediated by the mobile phone, figures into the micro-processes of economic development. It neither broadly elaborates the core contributions of mobile phone use to economic development (synchronizing prices, expanding markets, reducing transport costs, etc.), nor suggests that one kind of mobile use is more important than another. Instead, it argues simply for a perspective on work and on livelihoods that is broad enough to account for (and perhaps even take advantage of) the social processes surrounding these activities. Analysts, policymakers, and technologists

After access: challenges facing mobile-only internet users in the developing world

This study reports results of an ethnographic action research study, exploring mobile-centric internet use. Over the course of 13 weeks, eight women, each a member of a livelihoods collective in urban Cape Town, South Africa, received training to make use of the data (internet) features on the phones they already owned. None of the women had previous exposure to PCs or the internet. Activities focused on social networking, entertainment, information search, and, in particular, job searches. Results of the exercise reveal both the promise of, and barriers to, mobile internet use by a potentially large community of first-time, mobile-centric users. Discussion focuses on the importance of self-expression and identity management in the refinement of online and offline presences, and considers these forces relative to issues of gender and socioeconomic status.

Emergent practices around CGNet Swara, voice forum for citizen journalism in rural India

Rural communities in India are often underserved by the mainstream media. While there is a public discourse surrounding the issues they face, this dialogue typically takes place on television, in newspaper editorials, and on the Internet. Unfortunately, participation in such forums is limited to the most privileged members of society, excluding those individuals who have the largest stake in the conversation. This paper examines an effort to foster a more inclusive dialogue by means of a simple technology: an interactive voice forum. Called CGNet Swara, the system enables callers to record messages of local interest, and listen to messages that others have recorded. Messages are also posted on the Internet, as a supplement to an existing discussion forum. In the first 21 months of its deployment in India, CGNet Swara has logged over 70,000 phone calls and released 1,100 messages. To understand the emergent practices surrounding this system, we conduct interviews with 42 diverse stakeholders, including callers, bureaucrats, and members of the media. Our analysis contributes to the understanding of voice-based media as a vehicle for social inclusion in remote and underprivileged populations.

You're capped: understanding the effects of bandwidth caps on broadband use in the home

Bandwidth caps, a limit on the amount of data users can upload and download in a month, are common globally for both home and mobile Internet access. With caps, each bit of data consumed comes at a cost against a monthly quota or a running tab. Yet, relatively little work has considered the implications of this usage-based pricing model on the user experience. In this paper, we present results from a qualitative study of households living with bandwidth caps. Our findings suggest home users grapple with three uncertainties regarding their bandwidth usage: invisible balances, mysterious processes, and multiple users. We discuss how these uncertainties impact their usage and describe the potential for better tools to help monitor and manage data caps. We conclude that as a community we need to cater for users under Internet cost constraints.

Customer Acquisition among Small and Informal Businesses in Urban India: Comparing Face-to-face and Mediated Channels

This study further explores the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in small and informal businesses in the developing world by focusing on the role of ICTs in customer acquisition and retention. Data is drawn from a survey of 317 sole proprietors and operators of small businesses with five or fewer employees in and around urban Hyderabad in Southern India. Respondents describe how various customers were acquired—via walk‐in, referral, family connections, landline telephone, mobile phone, internet/email, etc. Results suggest that face‐to‐face interactions dominate customer interactions, even among those with access to ICTs. Four tests explore whether telephony enables more specialized, hands‐off, numerous or distant relationships with customers; a significant relationship between landline ownership and total number of customers is found.

A review of the research on mobile use by micro and small enterprises (MSEs)

The paper offers a systematic review of 14 studies of the use of mobile telephony by micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in the developing world, detailing findings about changes to enterprises internal processes and external relationships, and findings about mobile use vs. traditional landline use. Results suggest that there is currently more evidence for the benefits of mobile use accruing mostly (but not exclusively) to existing MSEs rather than new MSEs, in ways that amplify existing material and informational flows rather than transform them. The review presents a more complete picture of mobile use by MSEs than was previously available to ICTD researchers, and indentifies priorities for future research, including comparisons of the impact of mobile use across subsectors of MSEs and assessments of use of advanced services such as mobile banking and mobile commerce.

Experiencing interactive voice response (IVR) as a participatory medium: The case of CGNet Swara in India

With the widespread use of mobile phones in the developing world, interactive voice response (IVR) systems are increasingly accessible to people with low literacy and/or limited financial resources. Interest in using IVR systems as a means to increase citizen participation in society has increased. Yet, research exploring the potential of IVRs—with particular affordances, constraints, and norms—to facilitate citizen participation in society remains limited. Drawing on field data gathered as part of a study of CGNet Swara, an IVR-based citizen journalism platform in rural India, we introduce the concept of a “participatory IVR” and undertake a phenomenological inquiry to account for user interactions with the system.

'Connecting the world from the sky': Spatial discourses around Internet access in the developing world

This paper examines the discourses around emerging Internet connectivity solutions for rural and resource-constrained populations in the developing world. It draws primarily on interviews undertaken with 26 experts within the Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICTD) field, as well as on institutional explanatory and publicity materials put forward by several industry actors. We identify a sustained disconnect between different conceptions of how technology alters or bridges space---spatial imaginaries. Institutions use narratives that assume technologies eradicate or collapse distance, and thus drive transformative socioeconomic change. By contrast, expert accounts underscore the socially embedded nature of technologically mediated relations and non-infrastructural barriers to connectivity. The paper draws attention to the ways that these spatial ideas are used to justify the development of new infrastructures to extend Internet access in the developing world. The paper identifies a need for continued attention to spatial imaginaries in ICTD, not only as a guiding frame for critical research, but also as a means to improve collaboration between research and industrial practice.