Appropriating Technology

This month I have been in the Philippines researching participatory technology initiatives designed to include Filipino citizens in participatory governance programmes…

The last few weeks have been super busy here in the Digital and Technology Team at IDS. I’m preparing for fieldwork in the Philippines at the same time as we are juggling a raft of exciting new research proposals at various stages of development. Last week we ran the inagural Digital Development Summit at London’s South Bank Centre with partners Nesta and the Web Foundation and with funding from DFID…

On his Facebook page last week Richard Heeks, from the Centre for Development Informatics at Manchester University, was lamenting the fact that many ICT4D blogs have become inactive…

As recently as 2011, at an international conference, an expert from Africa’s first and foremost Tech Hub estimated that there might be as many as 14 or 15 hubs across Africa. The truth was that no-one knew for sure how many existed…

Last month I did some research on the role of ICTs in pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals and I thought that it might be useful to share some of those links here as an open resource. Hat tip to Anand Sheombar and to Linda Raftree for their help to me along the way…

Using indicators of ICT access as a proxy for development is problematic. It is entirely possible for ICTs to be universally available to everyone in a specific population whilst at the same time as levels of well-being, health and freedoms decline. The UK and USA are examples of countries where indicators of mobile and internet penetration have rapidly increased at the same time as economic depression, and expansion in health and income inequalities…

ICT4D often imagines that provision of internet access – and to the wealth of information on the world wide web – is itself empowering and that it constitutes ‘development’…

Amartya Sen argues that “critical agency is important in combating inequality of every kind”and that it is ‘pivotal’ to human development.

If this is true then any digital development initiative that is concerned to combat inequality or otherwise contribute to human development will want to make critical agency part of its process. So what is ‘critical agency’?

“Mobile Phones Promote Economic Growth” was the simple, technologically deterministic claim made by The Economist in 2007, citing as evidence Robert Jensen’s now famous study of mobile phone adoption in India. In the single most cited piece of research in the history of ICT4D,  “The Digital Provide”, Jensen studied the price of landed fish in Kerala between 1996 and 2001 before and after fishermen first gained access to mobile phones…

Given his philosophy of interconnectedness, the Buddha might be reduced to smiling compassionately at the technologically deterministic claims of some ICT4D folk that their ICT is the sole cause of a particular development outcome…