ICTs for Development blog
Catch up on the most recent posts from our Centre for Development Informatics blog.
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Digital financial inclusion in ten African countries: foregone digital dividends?
Gindo Tampubolon
18 October 2019
The story of mobile money in Africa, such as Mpesa, is one of the success stories to have arisen from the continent in recent years. A World Bank report in 2016, featured mobile money services, together with innovations from other places, to illustrate how digital technologies are yielding digital dividends in development. Specifically, the report highlighted […]
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Financial Inclusion and Institutional Voids: Are Digital Platforms a Solution?
Negar Tabrizi
2 September 2019
“What drives development” has long been a fundamental question for many scholars and policymakers. One consensus reached is that financial inclusion – access to and use of formal financial services by all members of an economy – is a central tenet of development [1]. It facilitates efficient allocation of productive resources by reducing the volume […]
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Trust Issues and Ride-Hailing Platforms in Lagos, Nigeria.
danielarubayi
17 July 2019
The idea of building trust is often central to the adoption and use of technology platforms in general such that the processes and governance of these platforms ought to align with the realities of user-groups which are essential for a seamless service. Since 2013, the entry of ride-hailing platforms in Nigeria has increased because of […]
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An Applied Data Justice Framework for Datafication and Development
Richard Heeks
25 June 2019
Data is playing an ever-growing role in international development. But what lens can we use to analyse the impact of data on development? The emerging field of “data justice” offers some valuable ideas but they have not yet been put together into a systematic and comprehensive framework. My open-access paper – Datafication, Development and Marginalised […]
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The Quest for the Digitisation of Education in Developing Countries: Are we Forgetting Teachers?
Felix Kwihangana
17 June 2019
The development of every country partly depends on how strong and reliable its educational system is to produce the best minds to innovate and bring new solutions to that country’s challenges. Often, this task automatically falls on teachers who generally get the blame for all failures of the education system but rarely get the praise […]
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Analysing the Perceptions of Digital Gig Workers: Mining Emotions from Job Reviews
rbbatista
30 May 2019
In a previous post, we provided a discussion of how the analysis of user-generated content (e.g. comments/posts on social media and/or job review sites) can help in understanding perceptions of digital gig workers. The prevailing assumption is that generally, digital gig workers contend with non-standard working conditions, e.g. the lack of social security coverage, long […]
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What can we learn about e-commerce in Africa from Jumia’s IPO filing?
Chris Foster
30 April 2019
There has been growing discussion about the potential of e-commerce in developing countries. This discussion intensified recently when pan-African e-commerce firm Jumia went public in the US, becoming the “first African unicorn”. The IPO prospectus, a 270-page outline of the firm released as part of this filing, has sparked much debate. Elsewhere, TechCrunch has […]
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Bricolage and the Sustainability of ICT4D Solutions
Leonard Peter Binamungu
23 April 2019
In ICT4D, bricolage refers to context-sensitive ways of implementing and sustaining ICT4D solutions [1]. Different from approaches where strategic goals, ways to achieve them, as well as success and failure metrics are defined in advance, bricolage is mostly characterised by improvisation and continuous learning from failures in environments with many uncertainties [2]. People who play […]
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Measuring the Broadband Speed Divide using Crowdsourced Data
Alfonso Rivera-Illingworth
21 March 2019
Digital applications and services increasingly require high-speed Internet connectivity. Yet a strong “broadband divide” exists between nations [1,2]. We try to understand how big data can be used to measure this divide. In particular, what new measurement opportunities can crowdsourced data offer? The broadband divide has been widely measured using subscription rates. However, the broadband […]
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Data, Platforms and Power
Richard Heeks
19 February 2019
We know that digital platforms can be very powerful, but how does their use of data relate to power? In three ways[1] that derive from the datafication and digitisation affordances of platforms: Addressing Information Failure. Platforms succeed in part by finding ways to overcome information failures in existing markets. These failures may be sources of […]
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