ICTs for Development blog
Catch up on the most recent posts from our Centre for Development Informatics blog.
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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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Digitally Removing the Middleman for Development: Trouble Brewing in East African Tea?
Chris Foster
11 February 2019
How do new digital technologies enable firms to develop? One process often highlighted is disintermediation, where digital technologies allow firms to “cut out the middleman”. Exploring the Kenyan tea auction we suggest that these ideas need to be rethought. Digital technologies bring change, but may lead to more challenging conditions for smaller firms. […]
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How Many Platform Workers Are There in the Global South?
Richard Heeks
29 January 2019
In developing countries, there has been a rapid increase in the gig economy and in the presence of digital labour platforms: defined as “a set of digital resources – including services and content – that enable value-creating interactions between consumers and individual service-providing workers”[1]. But how many workers actually work for such platforms? I am […]
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How Technology and Creativity is being used for Developing Ecotourism: Peace and Unity as a Shared Value to Overcome Environmental Problems in the West Senegal Islands of Niomoume.
anitagreenhill
21 January 2019
On the 28th-30th December 2018 the first edition of the Festival of the Islands of Casamance successfully took place on the Niomoume Islands of the Casamance region in Senegal (Ceesay, 2019) (Figure 1). The Festival was a three-day event bring together the arts, the Islands traditions, a conference and an Island tour all in the […]
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How Whatsapp Strengthens Livelihoods of Women Farmers in Rural Zimbabwe
Pfavai Natasha Nyajeka
11 December 2018
Whatsapp [1] (icon shown in Figure 1) is improving women farmer’s social capital – facilitating effective social networks in rural Zimbabwe. We know that mobile technology use leads to information sharing – with the possibility of building social capital and leading to asset creation. Some even argue that ultimately this can lead to better and sustainable […]
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