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ICT4D

My information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) research focuses on the causes and consequences of accessing and using information and communication technologies (ICTs) and information by individuals, communities, organizations, and governments around the world.

Sample causes, consequences, ICTs, information, individuals, communities, and organizations in my research projects and publications are as follows.

  • Causes: Informational, psychological, cognitive, organizational, demographic, geographic, policy-level, and cultural factors
  • Consequences: Digital, social, and financial inclusion; digital, financial, and information literacy; learning and autonomy; financial, social, and cultural empowerment; professional development; overcoming economic, psychological, geographic, and information vulnerabilities
  • ICTs: Mobile devices, websites, information systems, e-books, IBM’s Spoken Web for enabling the illiterate and visually impaired users to build voicesites similar to websites for uploading, searching, and retrieving information using mobile phones, mobile apps of social networking sites like WhatsApp and SnapChat, custom-built information system with operational and analytical capabilities for scaling operations of microfinance institutions to serve the rural poor, decision support systems, real-time performance dashboards for increasing the operational efficiency of microfinance institutions, open-source software, government websites, social media platforms, personal digital assistants, and a combination of smartcards and personal digital assistants to offer financial services to the poor at their doorstep in remote rural areas in developing countries.
  • Types of information: Demographic, health, financial, geographic, and agrarian
  • Individuals: Librarians; disabled students who use assistive technologies in the US; women earning less than a dollar a day in rural India; slum-dwellers earning less than a dollar a day in urban India; borrowers of microfinance institutes in developing countries, who are caught in the vicious cycle of debt and poverty; undergraduate and graduate students in Ethiopia India, North African countries, and Vietnam
  • Communities: “Vaginal Birth After Cesarean” (VBAC) group on Facebook, which consists of pregnant women in the doctor-centric birth culture in rural Appalachia in Tennessee; farmers in remote, rural parts of India, who use IBM’s Spoken Web to build information networks; thousands of communities of users formed around hashtags related to COVID-19 on Twitter
  • Organizations: Public libraries (e.g., urban, small, and rural), academic libraries in public universities, and small businesses in the US; microfinance institutions around the world; mobile money services in developing countries; government agencies in the Gulf Cooperation Council’s Countries