Savita Bailur

Welfare, agency and “ICT for Development”

This paper deconstructs the term ldquodevelopmentrdquo in ldquoICT for Developmentrdquo - does it imply welfare or agency? Using a framework of individual capability expansion and social choice theory, we illustrate how these two approaches may conflict, and present a simple model to explore how sometimes the Providers intention in providing an ICT artifact and the Users ultimate usage differ. We analyze our case studies of Our Voices and Hole in the Office against this and find that the User is likely to gain a tangible, immediate return on using agency-enhancing applications (particularly involving entertainment content), while the impact of welfare-enhancing applications is harder to achieve, given the complex contextual determinants of converting information on ldquopotentialrdquo welfare outcomes to ldquoactualrdquo welfare gains. We recommend further research on the welfare-agency tension, and on assessing paternalism in ldquoICT for developmentrdquo interventions.

Negotiating Women’s Agency through ICTs A Comparative Study of Uganda and India

Abstract In the early wave of optimism surrounding “ICTs and development” beginning 2000, much attention was paid to the potential of ICTs for empowering women. It was suggested that new technologies could help marginalized women in developing countries in areas ranging from agriculture to education, empowering women both economically and socially. However, subsequent research illustrated that such a straight outcome was not always the case. ICT interventions could equally result in a negligible or even negative impact on existing gender relations. This research argues a third point: In many cases women decide the extent to which they will adopt a particular technology on the basis of how they think it will affect the gender equilibrium. Based on our respective doctoral fieldwork on the use of mobile phones by female street traders in urban Uganda and an IT center and community radio in rural India, we ask: How strategically do women in developing countries negotiate agency through ICTs? Through these two case studies, we apply two concepts of agency, namely, “adaptive preference” and “patriarchal bargain” to understand how women decide to adopt ICTs. Empowerment through ICTs is not unproblematic, nor is it impossible; it is, however, illustrative of contextual, situated agency.

The liminal role of the information intermediary in community multimedia centres

Donor and government funded Internet kiosks, telecentres and community multimedia centres continue to be implemented in developing countries, yet many remain underutilised, and subsequently shut down. This paper argues that a large part of this is because not enough attention is paid to the information intermediaries - the centre or kiosk manager and staff, whose responsibility it is to translate government or donor policy at field level, and make ICTs more accessible to the public. There appears to be insufficient research on these critical individuals. Drawing on the ideas of contradiction and conflict from Giddenss structuration theory, and Goffmans concept of performance, we present the position of information intermediaries at a donor funded community multimedia centre in rural India. The analysis illustrates that the intermediaries stand on a shaky bridge between various groups of stakeholders. Firstly, they are somewhat condescending towards the community they are working with. Secondly, they are in turn regarded by their superiors as the bottom of the (developmentalist) pyramid. Thirdly, they encounter contradiction and conflict with other stakeholder groups. Fourth, they manipulate their performance according to the circumstances required. While information intermediaries play a critical role in facilitating public access to ICTs, they can also hinder it, and we call for greater care paid to these intermediaries when such centres are implemented.

Women’s income generation through mobile Internet: a study of focus group data from Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda

Abstract For many women in resource-constrained environments, mobile phones are the first and foremost information and communication technology (ICT) used. In theory, the increasing pervasiveness of mobiles and mobile Internet across developing countries should provide growing opportunities to women, especially in terms of earning through small, on-the-fly jobs, using the very mobility aspect of the devices. Using Donner’s six affordances of mobile Internet and Cornwall’s discussion of what women’s empowerment means, we analyze data from 30 focus groups conducted with 18 to 25-year-olds earning under

Representation and Reflexivity in ICT for Development (Telecentre) Research

2 a day in peri-urban areas of Nairobi, Kenya, Accra, Ghana and Jinja, Uganda). We explore the relation between the affordances of mobile Internet and structural changes in the economic and societal status of subjects, as reflected in the narratives of women adopters. We find that such affordances, while leading to new mechanisms for income generation, at least in our focus groups, do not result in changes of societal structures: older cultural stereotypes are built around adoption of the new technology, and policies underlying economic activities are hardly challenged by digitalization. This problematizes the extent to which the mobile Internet can be universally conceived as a tool for income generation, and by extension as a long-term, secure means for the empowerment of many women.

Using Stakeholder Theory to Analyze Telecenter Projects

The author argues there is insufficient discussion of representation (the problems of showing the realities of the lived experiences of the observed settings) and reflexivity (the relationship between knowledge and the ways whereby knowledge is produced) in ICTD literature, particularly regarding telecentre users and non-users. It first reviews six papers from 2007-8 in Information Technologies and International Development and find that the process of research methods and theorizing from findings could be analyzed in more detail. It then shares how deconstructing the research process affected findings in Our Voices telecentre, the authors own case study.