Economic development has been understood as a science of labor and capital relations that would be successfully worked out by macroeconomists. Technology was a part of this formula from the very beginning with emerging interest in the field after World War II. Originally the simple transfer of Western technologies was envisioned as an automatic boon to productivity in impoverished regions of the Global South. New ways, however, of understanding the issue are emphasizing the formulation of socio-technical systems in which tools, people, programs, policies, and/or business models are brought together to operate in concert. This project builds on this shift in focus by bringing theory from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to bear on the issue of socio-economic development.
The investigators will complete a comparative study using ethnographic techniques to examine how populations marginalized from the global economy define and pursue development. They will consider how digital connectivity tools have lately become implicated in these efforts. The topic will be explored through four diverse case studies. The cases include: 1) IT sector firms and their workers in Kenyans outsourcing industry 2) migrant women service workers in China who bring back tools and technical knowledge to their rural home areas and the work of an NGO (non-governmental organization) to coordinate these workers, 3) Ghana's market women and their trade activities that range from local to international in scope and increasingly involve communication technologies for negotiation and coordination work, and 4) household money management and, in particular, crisis handling among low income, rural and urban Ugandans and the role of mobile phones in these practices. The broader impact of this work will stem from real-world findings about how socio-economic development efforts are pursued and how they succeed or fail. Through conference participation, invited talks, and web-based publishing this findings will be made available to numerous aid agencies.
The research team examined the value and use of digital technologies for livelihood activities in several countries including South Africa, China, Uganda, and Ghana. Complementary work was also carried out in parallel through other funding support in Kerala, India and in Delhi, India. Extensive on-the-ground fieldwork produced country-specific insights which we were able to extend to cross-country comparisons showing the varied ways in which digital technologies (and especially mobile phones) have affected trade activities, farming, and household money management of low and middle-income populations. One of our primary findings is to question a narrow focus of much of the recent interest in ICT in the development aid sector on "information" dissemination. In particular we find activities best described as 'coordination work' to be the most significant use of mobile phones. We found that the consequences of the mobile phone (and other ICTs) were shaped by the political, economic, social, and material baseline which varied significantly between sites. The mobile phone does not in any simple sense have an "impact." Rather it offers a new set of resources that may (or may not) be taken up by users. Among these marginalized populations, the logic of technology adoption and use was strongly shaped by the need for risk mitigation, resource sharing, social support, and income smoothing. We posted working papers on our project website (http://markets.ischool.berkeley.edu) in an effort to disseminate findings more rapidly than academic publication cycles allow. These papers have been read and cited within the bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, foundations, and aid sector consultancies. We have been contacted by people within the World Bank, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN, USAID, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation USA, Catholic Relief Services (an NGO), SAP Innovation Centre-Mobile Empowerment Africa, and FHI 360. We have also used Twitter very successfully to draw attention to our working papers. Academic publications include peer-reviewed journal articles (in Economy and Society, Review of African Political Economy, Management Information Systems Quarterly) as well as peer-reviewed conference papers at the Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) conference.
