Conference and paper: Mobile Phones and the Internet in Latin America and Africa

November 5th, 2009 Africa, Agriculture, Latin America / LAC, conferences, m-banking, microenterprise, publications

Late last month I had the pleasure of attending a conference hosted by the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Cataluña in Barcelona. The conference, Mobile Phones and the Internet in Latin America and Africa: What Benefits for the Most Disadvantaged?  was a great opportunity to exchange insights between researchers working across disciplines and geographies. There were a number of good papers on migration and the condition of human mobility (not just wirelessness). Other highlights for me included meeting Judith Mariscal and Roxana Barrantes of DIRSI. Roxana has been gathering some excellent data in Peru on changes in household agricultural earnings pre-and post- mobile acquisition. It was also great to see Mirjam de Bruijn and Inge Brinkman, editors (w/ Francis Nyamnjoh) of Mobile phones: the new talking drums of everyday Africa. Their work, and that volume, explores mobile adoption in regions which do not appear often in the literature on ICT use, including Southeast Angola, Northern Cameroon, Chad, and Sudan.

I gave a talk based on a new paper reviewing mobile livelihood services in Africa (crop prices, virtual marketplaces, agricultural extension, etc). The paper is in draft form right now – I will be doing revisions in a few weeks before resubmitting for the conference publication. So, any comments, additions, or questions are most welcome.

Donner, J. (2009, 23-24 October). Mobile-based livelihood services in Africa: pilots and early deployments. Paper presented at the Conference on Development and Information Technologies. Mobile Phones and Internet in Latin America and Africa: What benefits for the most disadvantaged? Castelldefels, Barcelona.

The paper describes a collection of initiatives delivering various forms of support functions via mobile phones to small enterprises, small farms, and the self-employed. Using a review of 24 examples of such services currently operational in Africa, the analysis identifies five functions of mobile livelihood services: Mediated Agricultural Extension, Market Information, Virtual Marketplaces, Financial Services, and Direct Livelihood Support. It discusses the current reliance of such systems on the SMS channel, and considers their role in supporting vs. transforming existing market structures.

conference paper: exploring first-time internet use via mobiles in a South African women’s collective

September 1st, 2009 Africa, m-internet, mobile social software, publications

Shikoh Gitau, Gary Marsden and I have submitted a paper on first-time mobile internet use to the upcoming (3rd) conference of the International Development Informatics Association, to be held at Berg-en-Dal in Kruger National Park here in South Africa on 28-30 October 2009. The paper is in many ways a continuation of Shikoh’s previous fieldwork with mobile-centric internet users. Indeed, we called this study ‘phase II’. But here, we focus specifically on two questions:  what happens when the first and only means of accessing the internet is via one’s mobile?  What are the implications for M4D and ICTD?

The conference is at the end of October. So, this is only a pre-publication version and further edits are likely. But we’d welcome any comments or suggestions.  Abstract below:

This study reports results of an ethnographic action research study, exploring mobile-centric internet use. Over the course of 13 weeks, eight women, each a member of a livelihoods collective in urban Cape Town, South Africa, received training to make use of the data (internet) features on the phones they already owned. None of the women had previous exposure to PCs or the internet. Activities focused on social networking, entertainment, information search, and, in particular, job searches. Results of the exercise reveal both the promise of, and barriers to, mobile internet use by a potentially large community of first-time, mobile-centric users. Discussion focuses on the importance of self-expression and identity management in the refinement of online and offline presences, and considers these forces relative to issues of gender and socioeconomic status.

Gitau, S., Donner, J. and G. Marsden. (2009, 28-30 October). “i-Internet? Intle” (beautiful): Exploring first time internet use via mobile phones in a South African women’s collective. Paper to be presented at the 3rd Conference of the International Development Informatics Association, Kruger National Park, South Africa. 

article: Blurring livelihoods and lives

July 13th, 2009 publications

An article I wrote for the MIT journal Innovations is now available.  Here’s a link to my article.  The rest of the issue also looks great, with a focus on mobilizing markets (role of mobile telephony in improving markets).

Donner, Jonathan. (2009). Blurring livelihoods and lives: The social uses of mobile phones and socioeconomic development. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 4(1), 91-101.

This paper focuses on how an intermingling of lives and livelihoods, as mediated by the mobile phone, figures into the micro-processes of economic development. It argues for a perspective on work and on livelihoods that is broad enough to account for (and perhaps even take advantage of) the social processes surrounding these activities. Analysts, policymakers, and technologists interested in the application of Mobiles for Development (M4D) should not ignore the way mobiles blur livelihoods and lives; the developmental and ‘non-developmental’ uses of the mobile are not in competition, nor are they always distinguishable. Instead, the uses of mobiles for developmental and ‘non-developmental’ purposes are often interrelated and sometimes mutually reinforcing. The social functions of the mobile (in matters of connection and self-expression) are helping drive its widespread adoption, and these same functions inform the very behaviors that make the mobile a tool for economic development.