ICTD2010 - Research needs from a developing world perspective November 3, 2010

Hi John

I have some exciting news regarding ICTD2010. There is a very relevant pre-conference debate http://www.pre-conferenceictd2010.org/

The focus is dear to our hearts. It says the emphasis should be benefit of the beneficiaries and not adherence to a corporate agenda or to the particular constraints of a PhD programme.

I quote from the focus paper which ends with two questions:

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1) What are the ICT4D Research Needs in the developing world from a developing world perspective and why would you think so? Please be concrete and specific and go beyond general categories such as ‘health’, education etc.

2) What action projects have taken place in the developing world that were actually successful research projects, in the sense that they met a real need in a real way (and hence acted on valid and appropriate tacit knowledge) but did not have the ‘knowledge quest component’ worked out enough in their narrative to be recognized as research? Can you come up with examples and sketch what you think the knowledge quest would have been if it had been made explicit from the start?

It would be good to have your views to one or both of these questions expressed in one page (A4) of text. Please send these one pagers to both myself, Ineke Buskens at ineke@researchforthefuture.com and to Florian Sturm at flosturm@gmail.com.

You will like the focus paper  - it is about  "Bridging the Divides" - and addresses a lot of the divides that Dadamac is usually "on the wrong side of". It also says truths about those divides that echo what has been on our hearts for so long - but which, from our side of the divide, is hard to express in an appropriate and acceptable way.
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I am reading through and highlighting the paper.  It is long for an email, so I don't know how much I can include here, but I will press "send" and see what happens.
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Start of the full paper - Bridging the divides  - From ICTD2010

Moving towards ICTD2010 in dialogue: Creating a reflective space beyond the Great Divides in the ICTD community
http://www.pre-conferenceictd2010.org/

It is all about development…

ICT4D or ICTD is about development, this much is clear.

The question as to how development is understood by scholars, researchers and practitioners in these fields is less clear.

And that is worrying.

This lack of shared understanding of the main thrust and purpose of the ICTD or ICT4D project could be the main obstacle towards seeing the ICTD community evolve in such a way that we are all able to ‘celebrate one another’s unique strengths’, as Burrell and Toyama would like to see happen in their ITID Forum Piece ‘What constitutes Good ICTD Research?’ (Burrell and Toyama 2009, p 92).

It could also be the underlying reason for the fracturing and the perilous split Michael Best observes in our intellectual community “between the social sciences and engineering, policy makers and the legal community, practitioners and researchers” in his essay ‘Understanding our Knowledge Gaps: Or, Do we have an ICT4D field? And do we want one?’ (Best, February 2010; http://publius.cc).

It could be the reason why Anita Gurumurthy and Parminder Jeet Singh in ‘ICTD – Is it a New Species of Development?’, consider the last decade of ICTD as “a lost decade in many ways” (Gurumurthy and Toyama, 2009). According to Gurumurthy and Singh, ICTD “needs to represent a whole new political conception of transformative possibilities for the South, that is led by the South. It needs new theoretical frameworks built over development practice that is empowering to communities and marginalized sections. A reconstructed ICTD must also take from the insights and fault lines emerging in the politics of ICTs and of information and knowledge, from a Southern perspective” (p.11).

At the ICTD 2009 Doha conference I was prompted to raise the question: what does development actually mean in ICTD? Does ICTD mean development of ICTs for the developing world? Does it mean developing markets for ICT products and tools in the developing world? Or does it mean engaging development with and through the use of ICTs in and with the developing world?

These potential definitions vary greatly, and would seem to diverge the various disciplines and interest groups within the ICTD community, making splitting up more natural than trying to stay as one forum. The divides are many: there is the difference in understanding what good research is and how one should strive for quality among the various disciplines that make their contribution to the field, which Burrell and Toyama comment on; there is the lack of shared knowledge quests and mutual understanding among the various disciplines that Best reports on; and there is the difference between the South and the North about the nature of knowledge construction itself and the ethical and moral nature of the development project as such, and hence of ICTD, where Gurumurthy and Singh seem to come from.

I have to admit that I observed these divides during the 2009 Doha conference with a mixture of total bewilderment and deep sadness. I also have to admit that I was one of the social scientists that could have written Michael Best’s phrasing almost word for word: “A common story that I would hear from the social scientists is the computer scientists would get up and say ‘I decided to build this thing.  So I worked on this thing.  Then I worked a bit more on the thing, then I adjusted the thing, and then the thing was done.  Then I took my thing to Ghana and asked ten people whether they liked my thing.  Nine people liked my thing.  Hoorah for my thing’” (Best, 2010). This approach towards ICTD research, the ‘Hurray for my thing approach’, is insulting for the intended beneficiaries - and it also denigrates the researchers and practitioners who engage such research thinking. Best is probably right when he emphasizes the importance of ‘patient money’ so that researchers and practitioners can engage in really meaningful work that will allow them to stand in their integrity vis a vis their ICTD projects, the contexts and the beneficiaries.

Understanding southern needs and perspectives…

While I totally believe in the possibility of North-South and South-South collaboration on a basis of mutual learning and respect (I am a Northerner who has chosen to live in the South as my area of choice), and I also totally believe in staying true to one’s individual genius and making one’s contribution to the world from that space, ICTD research must, in my view, be grounded in a deep understanding of the needs, the dreams, the aspirations, the context and the reality of the lived experiences of the beneficiaries of these ICTD research efforts. And as the global wealth keeps being drawn to Northern areas while the South gets more impoverished, the reality of ICTD projects would tend to be directed towards Southern beneficiaries as most development efforts would.

It should be possible, however, to design a product or a program or an ICT tool as a service to others, starting from an understanding of the ICT needs of the intended beneficiaries or at least an understanding of their contexts, wishes, dreams, aspirations and challenges, to such a degree that a mutually satisfactory co-creation of ICT-based development efforts can emerge. Engaging ‘developmental action’ research projects in such a way would enable ICTD researchers to claim participation in pragmatic knowledge construction – provided, of course, that the invention is useful and meets real needs in a real way. In other words, the primary intent of ICTD or ICT4D research projects should be the benefit of the beneficiaries and not adherence to a corporate agenda or to the particular constraints of a PhD programme. I also think that a ‘southern needs and perspectives’’ oriented focus in ICT4D projects would have the potential to bring ICT4D researchers together across the divides of discipline, methodology and geographical location because it would create the space for alignment to a shared purpose, hence stimulating trans disciplinary thinking.

The ICT4D Divides

I take Michael Best’s point that designing and adapting ICTs requires technical insight and competence and that social scientists would tend to overlook this. But I would also like to suggest that much of the innovation that already happens and that could happen more is social in nature. I also suspect that when we could look beyond the ‘social-technical divide’ we would create new hybrid spaces where technical and social innovations go hand in hand. ICTD is a social science in the sense that the user perspective is primary: without users, there can never be a real ‘Hurray for my thing’. And because users live in vastly different contexts, their needs for and orientation towards technology could therefore vary greatly too. That there would be a need for technical innovation in many, maybe even most, ICTD projects thus seems to make total sense, but the nature and the timing of these technical design decisions would define whether the research project becomes yet another ‘hurray for my thing’ effort or has the chance to evolve into a truly path-breaking developmental action research intervention. Breakthrough technical inventions and interventions wrought out of seemingly ‘nothing’ in the past have always responded to human needs, aspirations, dreams and challenges and have been developed within the parameters of the desire to make human life or the lives for humans better, more unlimited, more gracious and more sustainable in all ways. I think that the technical dimension of ICTD as a (collection of) discipline(s) would not be much different in this regard.

When Burrell and Toyama would extend their quality criteria of ‘what constitutes good ICTD research’ with, for instance, a focus such as: ‘The project intending to contribute to making life better for the beneficiaries in real and sustainable ways; and hence recognizing the responsibility to being able to show a logical line of reasoning between its methods, results, processes, findings and outcomes and the intended impact through a well reasoned theory of change’, good ICTD research could come to mean (besides technically valid, useful and theoretically enriching and insightful research), socially responsible and respectful research that would set the stage for all parties to learn from and grow with one another.

A sensitive divide in the ICT4D community is the difference in awareness regarding the ways that power and knowledge speak to one another in development discourse and practice. ICTD research takes place in a tension field between the powerful and the powerless in terms of access to resources and knowledge. Therefore, to understand how power can influence ‘truth’ and define ‘truth’ to the degree that power comes to us in the guise of unquestioned assumptions about the nature of reality and of the intended beneficiaries, is crucial to one’s integrity as a researcher and to the quality of one’s project. Not taking a political position consciously does not mean that one does not take one actually: it means that the political position one takes, supports the existing status quo. Given the fact that there is now enough evidence that the current global, economic, financial and monetary systems we have chosen to govern our world are not sustainable and have contributed to vast social and environmental destruction, this is a difficult position to maintain in a gathering of critical scientists (Buskens, 2010).

I therefore share Gurumurthy’s and Singh’s concerns about the “utopian preoccupation with technology and an ahistoric conception of the world” that they witness in ICTD discourse. “It is as if new ICTs and their intrinsic push for free and open communication have suddenly rendered all known conceptions about social structures irrelevant” (p. 5). Our experiences within GRACE (Gender Research in Africa and Arab countries into ICTs for Empowerment) have revealed how the power invested in financial and patriarchal control which pervades all aspects of our social and economic interactions not only mediates ICT access, use and production but also inadvertently turns ICT users into handmaidens of these divisive mechanisms (Buskens, I. & Webb, A. 2009).

Because of these concerns, it is crucial that we create a space where we can converge with and within all our diversity and face these challenging questions together. The ICTD research field is new and our horizons are still open and malleable. Yet it is important to admit that we are all limited to what we can observe in the field, in our research projects and our shared discourses by the degrees to which we are formed and socialized by the specific disciplinary, gender and political positions we occupy (to name but a few). Only when we acknowledge that we could have entrenched ourselves behind walls (and maybe even in ditches) would it be possible for us to make real use of this exciting forum that the ICT2010 conference offers.

It is my intent through declaring my own position in this essay and opening the space for debates, sharing and comments, to create a forum where the voices that need to be heard more of, can be heard more of - the voices from the areas where most of the ICTD efforts are directed to: the global South. This was what I felt most missing in the 2009 ICTD conference in Doha. While the technical peer review for paper selection may have been robust, as Best states, I observed some worrying trends during the conference: On the one hand, many of the orally presented research projects missed relevance and substance because of their lack of insight into the actual research contexts and the ICT needs of the intended beneficiaries; and Many posters and demonstrations, while being totally relevant and grounded in a deep understanding of the respective contexts, missed a reflection on the knowledge quest that informed the subsequent successful actions and interventions that were displayed and demonstrated.

Invitation to Participate in this Dialogue

I hope that we can remedy this situation somewhat through and in this discussion space, and I thus want to invite ICTD researchers and practitioners to contribute by sharing what they really and passionately want to share, having a southern perspective in their focus and the interest of the South in their heart, whether they are located in the South, in the North, or in both.

I have formulated the following two questions to kick-start this process.

1) What are the ICT4D Research Needs in the developing world from a developing world perspective and why would you think so? Please be concrete and specific and go beyond general categories such as ‘health’, education etc.

2) What action projects have taken place in the developing world that were actually successful research projects, in the sense that they met a real need in a real way (and hence acted on valid and appropriate tacit knowledge) but did not have the ‘knowledge quest component’ worked out enough in their narrative to be recognized as research? Can you come up with examples and sketch what you think the knowledge quest would have been if it had been made explicit from the start?

It would be good to have your views to one or both of these questions expressed in one page (A4) of text. Please send these one pagers to both myself, Ineke Buskens at ineke@researchforthefuture.com and to Florian Sturm at flosturm@gmail.com.

If you want your one pagers uploaded so that other people can respond, comment or start co-writing on this text with you, please let us know and we can make this possible for you.

If you want to comment in other ways and / or want to discuss other issues that you think are relevant for the field of ICT4D, please feel free to send us your text (one page) and we can also upload this text if you want.

I think that if we succeed in opening up these pathways of thinking, we would not only be making exciting new intellectual discoveries but also regain some moral ground. Moral ground was lost in Doha by too much ‘hurray for too little a thing’, and it jarred the already fragile fault- lines existing in the ICTD research community. We have the chance to learn from this and create new and exciting ventures, adventures and joint ventures.

References

Best, M. Understanding our Knowledge Gaps: Or, Do we have an ICT4D field? And do we want one? Publius Project; Essay February 5, 2010 in response to A Dialogue on ICTs, Human Development, Growth, and Poverty Reduction http://publius.cc/understanding_our_knowledge_gaps_or_do_we_have_ict4d_field_and_do_we_want_o

Burrell, J. & Toyama, K. (2009) ‘What Constitutes Good ICTD Research?’ Information Technologies and International Development, Vol. 5, Number 3, fall 2009, 82-94.

Buskens, I. (2010). ‘Agency and Reflexivity in ICT4D Research: Questioning Women’s Options, Poverty, and Human Development’ Information Technologies & International Development's Harvard Forum II Special Edition, forthcoming.

Buskens, I. & Webb, A. (2009). African Women and ICTs: Investigating technology, Gender and Empowerment. London, Ottawa, Pretoria. Zed Books/IDRC/UNISA

Gurumurthy, A. & Jeet Singh, P. (2009) ICTD – Is it a New Species of Development’?’ IT For Change Perspective Paper.