Thomas Molony

ICT and human mobility: cases from developing countries and beyond

This special edition emerged from a two-day conference on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) held in May 2010 at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK. The conference title was intentionally broad – “ICT: Africa’s Revolutionary Tools for the 21 Century?” – in order to attract a wide variety of papers to satisfy Africanist delegates with an interest in ICTs in different countries/regions of the continent, and from varying fields of study. The conference succeeded in these aims, with a healthy mix of papers from both explicitly “developmental” perspectives (including keynotes from Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India on the “mobiles for development discourse,” and David Souter of ICT Development Associates on the evolution of ICT policy-making since the mid-1990s), and also those with a more general interest in how different aspects of African societies use mobile phones in particular settings: Julie Soleil Archambault (University of Oxford) presented on “Mobile Phones and the Transformative Powers of Information in Inhambane, Southern Mozambique,” for example, and Hans Hahn (University of Frankfurt) on “Mobile Phones and the Transformation of Society: New Forms of Criminality and the Ambivalence of ‘Networks’ in Burkina Faso.” The focus on mobile phones among the range of possible ICTs came as little surprise, and there was a strong interest in the good number of papers that spoke to the “revolutionary” title of the conference: among them Chambi Chachage (Harvard University) on ICTs as new tools for citizen agency in Tanzania, and Guy Collender (London International Development Centre) on the double-edged sword of ICT in conflict situations. Discussion focussed on the use of mobile phones during elections, the reporting of human rights abuses, and on crowdsourcing during times of political unrest. Not long after the conference the “Arab Spring” then rose in the northern reaches of Africa, and interest in the use of social media across the continent has now exploded as academics, donors, governments, activists and the private sector are seeking to understand the consequences of vast numbers of people – some disillusioned with current politics – now having access to new sources of information and means of communication. What was not anticipated when the broad call for papers was given was a large response from those with an interest in ICT and human mobility. The interest may have been in reply to the call in an influential overview paper to “delve deeper to explore how the utility of mobility compares to basic connectivity” (Donner, 2008, p. 152), or it may simply have been fortunate timing, when various findings came together after the realization that – to use Mirjam De Bruijn’s title phrase from her inaugural lecture of the same year – “the telephone has grown legs” (De Bruijn, 2008) and the very mobility that the mobile phone offers became a rich research field for those with various interests in developing countries. Some findings have since been reported on mobility and marginalization in developing countries (e.g., Molony, 2009), and research has been conducted on the understandings of mobile phones and distance in remote locations (e.g., De Bruijn et al., 2010), but this work on the Cameroonian Grassfields is exceptionally recent in academic terms when put into the perspective of societies that have inhabited this area of west