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Almost all formal organizations employ service staff for tasks such as housekeeping, security, maintenance, and transport at their office facility. Many of these workers earn wages in line with menial-labor salaries in their respective countries. They have few on-the-job opportunities to upgrade their skills or learn new ones. Kelsa+ is an initiative through which organizations in developing countries...
This study investigates the causes of variation in government policies to use information and communication technologies to improve service delivery to citizens. I ask why state governments in India vary in the number and type of services they offer to citizens through technology-enabled citizen service centers. I argue that politicians estimate the expected electoral benefits from providing improved...
We examine the extent to which user-based subsidies can promote the sustainability and development impact of telecenters, where sustainability is defined in financial and social terms. We do this by looking at a coupon scheme used by the USAID funded eCenter network in Kyrgyzstan. The network consisted of partnerships with existing commercial computer centers which provided fee-based ICT services...
This paper presents our work in the design of a SDS for the provision of health information to caregivers of HIV positive children. We specifically address the frequently debated question of input modality in speech systems; touchtone versus speech input, in a new context of low literacy users and a health information service. We discuss our experiences and fieldwork which includes needs assessment...
The paper presents the results from an assessment study of eight e-government projects from India. The assessment framework measured the total value delivered by a project to various stakeholders on three dimensions: (a) cost to clients for accessing services; (b) perception of quality of service and governance; and (c) agency cost and revenue. Data was collected from randomly selected users encapsulating...
The paper demonstrates how appropriate technology, when combined with quality curriculum-based content, has the potential to have a positive impact on primary education within developing countries. It documents an evaluation of portable learning technology from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology in Malawi, providing theoretical background and educational context before detailing the...
It is estimated that there are 100 million ??street children?? in the world. Street children typically live independent of families in makeshift living arrangements, and survive on little but their wits and the camaraderie of small gangs. To better understand the lives of street children, we conducted 150 days of ethnographic investigations in and around Calcutta, with an emphasis on street children...
This work consists of two main components: (a) a longitudinal ethnographic study in Kyrgyzstan that demonstrates the importance of transportation resources in the developing world and how to plan for an appropriate ICT solution, and (b) the results of a proof-of-concept system engineered to create a bottom-up, transportation information infrastructure using only GPS and SMS. Transportation is a very...
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in disadvantaged communities have a variety of data-collection and analysis needs, for example, for performing surveys or monitoring programs. Because much of this data collection occurs in environments with insufficient IT support and infrastructure, and among populations not always comfortable with technology, paper forms rather than electronic methods...
Information access by low literate users is a difficult task. Critical information, such as in the field of healthcare, can often mean the difference between life and death. We have developed spoken language interface prototypes aimed at low literate users, and tested them with community health workers in Pakistan. We present results showing that 1) in contrast to previous reports in the literature,...
This case study investigates under which conditions ICTs can play a role in fostering the empowerment of rural communities to fully participate in the decision-making processes of local governments. The analysis using empirical evidence from rural communities in Bolivia focuses hereby on the following key questions: (i) to what extent can ICTs contribute to improving the efficiency and efficacy of...
The work presented here describes the concept of ubiquitous interactive classrooms by demonstrating emerging, low-cost presentation technologies including the Nintendo Wii and palm-sized projectors. The authors also discuss how they can be used to promote better learning through ad-hoc digital interaction in traditional classrooms and the field.
Organizations in developing regions want to efficiently collect digital data, but standard data gathering practices from the developed world are often inappropriate. Traditional techniques for form design and data quality are expensive and labour-intensive. We propose a new data-driven approach to form design, execution (filling) and quality assurance. We demonstrate USHER, an end-to-end system that...
This work advances the state-of-the-art in assistive technology for the visually impaired by enhancing an automated tutor designed to teach beginner-level braille writing skills. The hardware component of the tutor is a low-cost device that provides an intelligent tactile interface that connects to a laptop or desktop computer. We demonstrate the many uses of this tutor including its multilingual...
Web search and browsing have been streamlined for a comfortable experience when the network connection is fast. Existing systems, however, are not optimized for scenarios where connectivity is poor, as is the case for many users in developing regions where fast connections are expensive, rare, or unavailable. We examined the challenges faced by users behind one of these connections in a previous study,...
Tracking and ensuring disbursements make it to their intended recipients is among the problems development professionals are most concerned about. To examine the potential monitoring role playable by technology, we present RuralScope, an information repository designed to handle the information needs of a newly started welfare scheme offering daily wage payments to over 31 million families in rural...
Much recent work in multiple input use scenarios for children's learning software has focused either on math or on English language learning. The persistence of under-information among children in the developing world on issues of hygiene and disease prevention remains a massive challenge within the scholarly community in public health, especially in the developing regions that multiple input learning...
FRUILEMA, a Malian fruit and vegetable economic interest group (EIG), is acquiring the tools and resources needed to meet the requirements (GLOBALGAP certification) for exporting Malian farm products to international markets. Starting with the highly marketable mango fruit, an ICT solution has been developed to enable the identification of producers, to trace farm plots and produce, and to obtain...
Organizations in low income regions need tools for collecting and reporting on data. Existing paper-based approaches are often slow and incomplete when compared to data collection tools on mobile devices. In this demonstration, we present the authors Android-based system in addition to broader work by the OpenRosa Consortium - a community dedicated to building open source, standards-based tools for...
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